HOW I'D BEGUN
WRITING DRAMA:
Part 1.
It started. ('Yes' - he stares intently while speaking forthrightly,
'I would imagine that you've already taken your share of that
fortune, no?')...When I read something old by LeRoi Jones -
Dutchman, Toilet, Urinal, I forget - one of those things - I
realized that people talk even as they walk. It happens, and
not just on stage. (Marginalia : instructions for the stage, small
notes about this and that. Yes, it has its moments, interesting,
fun).What is this guy thinking about? Getting at? He speaks
flatly, while moving one boot up onto the shelf. He begins to
lace it while propping himself up.
-
Mark Twain Tonight, Hal Holbrook. A Doxology plays in
the background as the stage lights, at first quite dim, come
up slowly - all we hear is Holbrook's voice mimicking
Twain : 'I don't care about a God-damned thing. Lands!
This world is full of shit!'
-
Analysand-office scene; wood-paneled, a few fine
leather chairs and a glass-topped desk. Couch.
Hourglass. Chimes. 'I sat down with my analyst
- Dr. Fredric Kerner - for the 71st visit. Oh, yes,
he keeps track, as do I, and he verbally logs each
session. I get to hear myself back whenever he or
I wishes - and the notes he wrote too about each.
Once a week, with three skips in a year. That means
I've been doing this now for near onto a year and a
half! Egads! What dedication!'
-
'This life with you makes me want to be an exhibitionist.'
(Carnival background, calliope noises, a stage set of
carousel horses in motion. A fake full moon hangs
precariously over the scene). 'I walk like a jester
every night, and still you take me down a peg. Is
there nothing more to do? This is too big, this is
too small - my God, how should I feel when that's
about me? Or is it then not. Is there any farther
we can go. Good night, Applewhite. It's all I can
remember, you've beaten me down so.'
-
(Stage goes dark. The pealing of a lone, somber bell
is heard from somewhere off. Repeated. Then, also
from off-stage, comes faintly a siren and another
(clashing) bell) - 'If I've ever attained anything, it
was no attainment at all. Or do I mean otherwise
this - if I've ever achieved anything it was no
achievement at all. Which is the better word
anyway? I'll not know. She was just a heart
from the riverside, probably why I loved her
best. I remember I told her 'I've got my own
story, babe, and I don't need yours.' Really
stupid, that was, now looking back. What a
jerk I could have been. I ain't got no breath
to go it alone. Highways and byways of a
never-ending grace.' (Stage goes silent and
dark...).
-
'Nature invented hunger, we invented bullshit.
He had a good vocabulary, except when he was
talking to someone. A disease-artist, like begging
us to send money to his afflicted children, to care
for them on the Anzo-Borrea Desert border. This
'true-life', I'm finding, is not reducible to words,
either spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.
The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking,
feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, in
all those submicroscopic and personal moments -
that are better than all the rest.'
-
'Damnable situations, plebeians routing the horse-farms,
free'd slaves burning down the barns and houses.
Manumission, I think was the word we were taught.
Lincoln maybe freed those slaves, but no one ever
freed Old Abe.' Sliding back in his leather chair,
as the slow lights once again come up, the analyst,
it seems, has fallen asleep - until suddenly an
alarm-clock goes off on the edge of the desk.
'Oh dear. It seems our time this time is over
for good. Or have I myself been dreaming?
How curious, how tiring, how mysterious
now this all is.' The stage goes dark.
WRITING DRAMA:
Part 1.
It started. ('Yes' - he stares intently while speaking forthrightly,
'I would imagine that you've already taken your share of that
fortune, no?')...When I read something old by LeRoi Jones -
Dutchman, Toilet, Urinal, I forget - one of those things - I
realized that people talk even as they walk. It happens, and
not just on stage. (Marginalia : instructions for the stage, small
notes about this and that. Yes, it has its moments, interesting,
fun).What is this guy thinking about? Getting at? He speaks
flatly, while moving one boot up onto the shelf. He begins to
lace it while propping himself up.
-
Mark Twain Tonight, Hal Holbrook. A Doxology plays in
the background as the stage lights, at first quite dim, come
up slowly - all we hear is Holbrook's voice mimicking
Twain : 'I don't care about a God-damned thing. Lands!
This world is full of shit!'
-
Analysand-office scene; wood-paneled, a few fine
leather chairs and a glass-topped desk. Couch.
Hourglass. Chimes. 'I sat down with my analyst
- Dr. Fredric Kerner - for the 71st visit. Oh, yes,
he keeps track, as do I, and he verbally logs each
session. I get to hear myself back whenever he or
I wishes - and the notes he wrote too about each.
Once a week, with three skips in a year. That means
I've been doing this now for near onto a year and a
half! Egads! What dedication!'
-
'This life with you makes me want to be an exhibitionist.'
(Carnival background, calliope noises, a stage set of
carousel horses in motion. A fake full moon hangs
precariously over the scene). 'I walk like a jester
every night, and still you take me down a peg. Is
there nothing more to do? This is too big, this is
too small - my God, how should I feel when that's
about me? Or is it then not. Is there any farther
we can go. Good night, Applewhite. It's all I can
remember, you've beaten me down so.'
-
(Stage goes dark. The pealing of a lone, somber bell
is heard from somewhere off. Repeated. Then, also
from off-stage, comes faintly a siren and another
(clashing) bell) - 'If I've ever attained anything, it
was no attainment at all. Or do I mean otherwise
this - if I've ever achieved anything it was no
achievement at all. Which is the better word
anyway? I'll not know. She was just a heart
from the riverside, probably why I loved her
best. I remember I told her 'I've got my own
story, babe, and I don't need yours.' Really
stupid, that was, now looking back. What a
jerk I could have been. I ain't got no breath
to go it alone. Highways and byways of a
never-ending grace.' (Stage goes silent and
dark...).
-
'Nature invented hunger, we invented bullshit.
He had a good vocabulary, except when he was
talking to someone. A disease-artist, like begging
us to send money to his afflicted children, to care
for them on the Anzo-Borrea Desert border. This
'true-life', I'm finding, is not reducible to words,
either spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.
The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking,
feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, in
all those submicroscopic and personal moments -
that are better than all the rest.'
-
'Damnable situations, plebeians routing the horse-farms,
free'd slaves burning down the barns and houses.
Manumission, I think was the word we were taught.
Lincoln maybe freed those slaves, but no one ever
freed Old Abe.' Sliding back in his leather chair,
as the slow lights once again come up, the analyst,
it seems, has fallen asleep - until suddenly an
alarm-clock goes off on the edge of the desk.
'Oh dear. It seems our time this time is over
for good. Or have I myself been dreaming?
How curious, how tiring, how mysterious
now this all is.' The stage goes dark.
Part 2.
I am sitting lazily thinking about what I'd
just heard : the guy going out, he said, to 'have a
cigarette', to which I responded 'no, no, you're
going out to NOT have a cigarette, because when
you get back in here, that cigarette will be gone.
You're really going out to NOT have a cigarette.'
He laughed, although I was dead serious.
(The distant sound of a streetcar is heard,
the little screech and whine of metal, and -
once more - a bell. Bright yellow lights go
up slowly, denoting sunrise, perhaps an
early morning daybreak (same but not).
The loud caw of a morning blackbird is
recurring). 'Ah, another day. Everyone
here seems so willing to get up and go out.
Amazing, how we awake each day to a new
batch of some day's energy. How and why?'
A hand is seen rubbing a neck - long, slender
fingers, a girl's hand, with well-cared for nails.
Two voices, muffled, can be heard nuzzling, as
if heads together. The backdrop here changes -
a woodsy, dark stand of trees, with the sound of
running creek or stream water, over rocks. 'I love
how you looked at me, even when I was fifteen.
You drove me crazy way back when. Little did
you know what that did to my nights.'
-
One time I remember. He played a bunch of
stuff back to me, things I'd said but forgotten I'd said.
I guess. He sat there placid like water, which drove me
crazy. (Lights turn purple, stage darkens, a recorded
crazy. (Lights turn purple, stage darkens, a recorded
voice is heard trying to get past itself speaking).
'Speak to me, something. And I am trying. Shovel
like a plane, one flat surface drying, now bent in a
gutter near where the old churchyard sits, Spiegel &
Vine Aves., I think. And, and yes, I remember the
girl, the girl who came over to me and said 'last
shift of the year for me!' She says to me. She
was really happy. And then, also, I remember
fishing in the ice. I never liked that much - the
doughty fire blowing cinders along the surface,
and the attempts to drink coffee where no such
attempts should exist. The black dog barking, outside
of the lighted circle, just barking at the night, at the dark,
one dumb bark after the other. Weird. Long, fire-thrown
shadows moving everywhere. And the other men, with
bottles of brandy in their pants pockets.' (The Doctor,
in shadow, is seen getting up to walk around the desk,
retrieving something, and then lighting his pipe.)
-
He came over to me, I remember, and asked what I knew (?)
and then he said 'have you ever found completion?' and of
course I had no idea what that meant except that it
sounded the equivalent of some frothy insider's talk,
some lawyerly frieze in a barred-off courtroom, so I looked
at him and said 'Well, no. Actually one of the things that
bothered me the most, as I look back now, was the guys
with the booze in their coat pockets - all those bottles and
I could never tell the difference, and still don't know. What's
Scotch against Brandy, what's Rum against either and anyway
what's Whiskey, plain and simple, by itself? And what is it
that men would drink alongside fires on the ice? As a youngster,
what was I witnessing?' (a serving-woman walks in, as the lights
go up a bit - she's carrying a tray of cookies and cake. She wears a
big flouncy house-dress, an Aunt Jemima type head wrap, and speaks
slowly in a (yes) southern drawl : 'Does either of you gents want
some biscuits or cookies? And I've got tea here, or coffee, whichever.'
As she turns about, she places the tray on the desktop, and is
seen slowly walking away - faint music begins playing, Stephen
Foster, Swanee River, but then stops abruptly as the lights go dark).
-
(Wind blows, and is heard loudly outside the window. A set of
candles now flickers on the desk.) 'I want you now to listen
carefully to me; this is a sheet of notes you gave to me,
if you recall, last year : 'My horror of unbearable things; watch
with me. Come see God in the role of Destroyer. God is horrific,
as Joseph Campbell put it, and I'll buy in. The monster of
horrendous apparition exploding all standards for harmony,
order, and ethical conduct? God in the role of destroyer, that's
all I see; going past all sound judgment, wild, crazed, ancient
and unsatisfiable old ways. A vengeful, forgetful old man -
that's your God! Precisely made crazed by a total effectiveness
producing ineffective, flawed beings. Even I can see now the
exposure God's facing or, well once did anyway. See, now,
God is really dead, and you are made free to fail ! (where
failure's no success at all). Multidimensional and omni-present?
What a crock is that! The real is that which swallows it all,
and it is, as well, the Real which sustains us all.' He seemed shaken,
even for a doctor, as he read this. He went on. 'And then, for whatever
reason, can't remember, we were talking Valerie, you added this -
'Listen to me. Your bedsheets are stained. Your panties are stained,
your drawers are unimpeachably stained forever, and you are
liquid running out, yes ! you are liquid running out.' He seemed
agitated by these words. 'I will need to know, now, as we review -
what were you meaning here? What were you trying to say?'
(A noise is heard. The candles blow out. Room, dark).
Part 3.
Notes from the record factory : Just because I
wrote it, doesn't mean it's true. Or could that just
as well be - just because it's written, doesn't mean
it's true. Leaving me out of it. Of course. Like a raft
on the blood-red sea, is that body upon it seen alive
or dead, asleep or just resting, floating and drifting,
or floating and drifting with a purpose? And then of
course, if a large fish came abreast of it, could it be
'drifting with a porpoise?' You see the magic?
DO you see the magic in words?
Or anyway, is there?
-
(In some form of fog, the bare lightbulb is shown
alone, is if illuminating a cell. Another distant, bleating
bell drones on, its sound oddly elongated by echo
or something to suggest the 'stretching' of time or
the moment. From the left, in comes, slowly and
with difficulty, a soldier, an old apparition of a
soldier in any case, dressed in Revolutionary War
uniform and rags, tattered and beat. Behind him
can be heard the sounds of fighting and struggle.)
'I'm the last, I'm survived. Just to say I was so
brutally cold, all this time. My feet were both frozen
frozen to black and rags no longer did the work. The
snow along the river, the freezing water, all that. Gunfire,
struggle, fighting and death - all nothing, I don't want to
live it again. I am dead now you understand? I am dead
and yet you see me. Do you want to come to this? Listen.
I tell you now - none of this is going to be worth it. Nothing.'
-
He fades away and the light returns to show the same space
as previous. Kerner still sits. He's looking through a pile of
hand-written papers, the same ones from which he'd just been
reading aloud. He randomly reads out: "'Got nobody but the word
she shielded...self-deception is like the copying of a status given
by one's shadow...the map has many directions, while the legend,
along the bottom, shows but four...all that pleasure, all that pain.'
I can't for the life of me fathom what you were thinking. Do you
wish to go on?" I take a moment, and then respond 'As you like. Of
course I'll go on. You're not fooling me with that feigned reluctance.
This is your method and your whole reason for being here - this office,
your world, your life, your very career. I have more substantial stuff to
stand on than you do - all this professional crap, you're not fooling me.
You'd collapse in a minute if it was taken from you. This is your facade.'
-
'Couldn't dream of dreaming any more. Walked the highway, just
looking forward to something. The old sick Rahway Prison dome
reminded me of death and sickness and control and all bad things.
Even the new white snow couldn't prettify that mess. I thought of all
the people inside there - every qualification of negativity one could
think of, even the guards who, to my knowledge, first-hand, were
equal to or better than any of the inmates in their peculiar perversities.
I've been told stories, accounts by sick drunks behind bars - the other
kind - and straight or drunk it's all the same. Guards are fools
just like inmates are fools and no one's every innocent of anything.
It's at the lowest level of society, the mis-education of time and property,
that you get the functional perversion of geeks with unions and all the
job-guarantees that carry them through the day : cops and guards,
firemen, teachers, all the rest of authority - priests and nuns and all
that - pure, vested perversion given a place, put in place, and then
paid well. You see, that soldier guy knew well what was to happen -
Capitalism is destruction. It has to spread, and own everything.
It produces its perversion so it can 'own' it. It peddles sex and
advertising, so it can 'own' sex. If it doesn't 'own'
something, it's powerless - so it constantly has to throw all
this gross perversion out at us for reasons of its own power :
the drive for control. It needs to 'own' - as I've said over and over.
Authority thus reinforces the very 'crime' it supposed to be in place
to prevent or avoid. That's what that poor guy was trying to say -
you and your dumb illusions be damned. I got his message perfectly.'
(A blazing forest-fire is here shown, silently, projected on a large
back screen. The image, in silence, remains in place and is seen
steadily for a few minutes' duration. Slowly, the room darkens,
and blackness ensues).
He came over to me, I remember, and asked what I knew (?)
and then he said 'have you ever found completion?' and of
course I had no idea what that meant except that it
sounded the equivalent of some frothy insider's talk,
some lawyerly frieze in a barred-off courtroom, so I looked
at him and said 'Well, no. Actually one of the things that
bothered me the most, as I look back now, was the guys
with the booze in their coat pockets - all those bottles and
I could never tell the difference, and still don't know. What's
Scotch against Brandy, what's Rum against either and anyway
what's Whiskey, plain and simple, by itself? And what is it
that men would drink alongside fires on the ice? As a youngster,
what was I witnessing?' (a serving-woman walks in, as the lights
go up a bit - she's carrying a tray of cookies and cake. She wears a
big flouncy house-dress, an Aunt Jemima type head wrap, and speaks
slowly in a (yes) southern drawl : 'Does either of you gents want
some biscuits or cookies? And I've got tea here, or coffee, whichever.'
As she turns about, she places the tray on the desktop, and is
seen slowly walking away - faint music begins playing, Stephen
Foster, Swanee River, but then stops abruptly as the lights go dark).
-
(Wind blows, and is heard loudly outside the window. A set of
candles now flickers on the desk.) 'I want you now to listen
carefully to me; this is a sheet of notes you gave to me,
if you recall, last year : 'My horror of unbearable things; watch
with me. Come see God in the role of Destroyer. God is horrific,
as Joseph Campbell put it, and I'll buy in. The monster of
horrendous apparition exploding all standards for harmony,
order, and ethical conduct? God in the role of destroyer, that's
all I see; going past all sound judgment, wild, crazed, ancient
and unsatisfiable old ways. A vengeful, forgetful old man -
that's your God! Precisely made crazed by a total effectiveness
producing ineffective, flawed beings. Even I can see now the
exposure God's facing or, well once did anyway. See, now,
God is really dead, and you are made free to fail ! (where
failure's no success at all). Multidimensional and omni-present?
What a crock is that! The real is that which swallows it all,
and it is, as well, the Real which sustains us all.' He seemed shaken,
even for a doctor, as he read this. He went on. 'And then, for whatever
reason, can't remember, we were talking Valerie, you added this -
'Listen to me. Your bedsheets are stained. Your panties are stained,
your drawers are unimpeachably stained forever, and you are
liquid running out, yes ! you are liquid running out.' He seemed
agitated by these words. 'I will need to know, now, as we review -
what were you meaning here? What were you trying to say?'
(A noise is heard. The candles blow out. Room, dark).
Part 3.
Notes from the record factory : Just because I
wrote it, doesn't mean it's true. Or could that just
as well be - just because it's written, doesn't mean
it's true. Leaving me out of it. Of course. Like a raft
on the blood-red sea, is that body upon it seen alive
or dead, asleep or just resting, floating and drifting,
or floating and drifting with a purpose? And then of
course, if a large fish came abreast of it, could it be
'drifting with a porpoise?' You see the magic?
DO you see the magic in words?
Or anyway, is there?
-
(In some form of fog, the bare lightbulb is shown
alone, is if illuminating a cell. Another distant, bleating
bell drones on, its sound oddly elongated by echo
or something to suggest the 'stretching' of time or
the moment. From the left, in comes, slowly and
with difficulty, a soldier, an old apparition of a
soldier in any case, dressed in Revolutionary War
uniform and rags, tattered and beat. Behind him
can be heard the sounds of fighting and struggle.)
'I'm the last, I'm survived. Just to say I was so
brutally cold, all this time. My feet were both frozen
frozen to black and rags no longer did the work. The
snow along the river, the freezing water, all that. Gunfire,
struggle, fighting and death - all nothing, I don't want to
live it again. I am dead now you understand? I am dead
and yet you see me. Do you want to come to this? Listen.
I tell you now - none of this is going to be worth it. Nothing.'
-
He fades away and the light returns to show the same space
as previous. Kerner still sits. He's looking through a pile of
hand-written papers, the same ones from which he'd just been
reading aloud. He randomly reads out: "'Got nobody but the word
she shielded...self-deception is like the copying of a status given
by one's shadow...the map has many directions, while the legend,
along the bottom, shows but four...all that pleasure, all that pain.'
I can't for the life of me fathom what you were thinking. Do you
wish to go on?" I take a moment, and then respond 'As you like. Of
course I'll go on. You're not fooling me with that feigned reluctance.
This is your method and your whole reason for being here - this office,
your world, your life, your very career. I have more substantial stuff to
stand on than you do - all this professional crap, you're not fooling me.
You'd collapse in a minute if it was taken from you. This is your facade.'
-
'Couldn't dream of dreaming any more. Walked the highway, just
looking forward to something. The old sick Rahway Prison dome
reminded me of death and sickness and control and all bad things.
Even the new white snow couldn't prettify that mess. I thought of all
the people inside there - every qualification of negativity one could
think of, even the guards who, to my knowledge, first-hand, were
equal to or better than any of the inmates in their peculiar perversities.
I've been told stories, accounts by sick drunks behind bars - the other
kind - and straight or drunk it's all the same. Guards are fools
just like inmates are fools and no one's every innocent of anything.
It's at the lowest level of society, the mis-education of time and property,
that you get the functional perversion of geeks with unions and all the
job-guarantees that carry them through the day : cops and guards,
firemen, teachers, all the rest of authority - priests and nuns and all
that - pure, vested perversion given a place, put in place, and then
paid well. You see, that soldier guy knew well what was to happen -
Capitalism is destruction. It has to spread, and own everything.
It produces its perversion so it can 'own' it. It peddles sex and
advertising, so it can 'own' sex. If it doesn't 'own'
something, it's powerless - so it constantly has to throw all
this gross perversion out at us for reasons of its own power :
the drive for control. It needs to 'own' - as I've said over and over.
Authority thus reinforces the very 'crime' it supposed to be in place
to prevent or avoid. That's what that poor guy was trying to say -
you and your dumb illusions be damned. I got his message perfectly.'
(A blazing forest-fire is here shown, silently, projected on a large
back screen. The image, in silence, remains in place and is seen
steadily for a few minutes' duration. Slowly, the room darkens,
and blackness ensues).
-
'So, wouldn't I like to read that there wasn't ever no
sacred harp, no large mountains whereon the Gods
dwelt, no land's edge from which crept great monsters from
out of the sea? Yes, of course, but no, as well. I want everything
all mixed up, see, this life as a long-boiling kettle of things and
possibilities. The wars along the fringes of countries where they
still believe in ancient Gods? Sure! All those Jews and Muslims
fighting it out, while Christians the world over change every belief
they ever had as quickly as Science tells them go! Catholic charnel
houses and bathrooms with glass walls where priests watch nuns
masturbate to liturgical chant? Muslims feasting on the hands of
little children? Women stoned by the crowd, with only their heads
protruding from the ground while the rest of their bodies are straight
down in the hole just dug. Their exposed skull getting battered - to
Death mind you, to Death - by the heaved stones of vicious and
sickening Allah drones? Is that all you want to hear, over and over the
dolloped outpourings, the muck of disgust and disaster? I can serve that
up to you, no problem! (The sound of water, flooding in, is heard. the
Doctor is swept off his feet by the current, and two men in a boat
float swiftly by while fighting that current with their feeble oars.
The lights then come back up, somehow returning us to the
carnival grounds from before. Children are crying on swings).
sacred harp, no large mountains whereon the Gods
dwelt, no land's edge from which crept great monsters from
out of the sea? Yes, of course, but no, as well. I want everything
all mixed up, see, this life as a long-boiling kettle of things and
possibilities. The wars along the fringes of countries where they
still believe in ancient Gods? Sure! All those Jews and Muslims
fighting it out, while Christians the world over change every belief
they ever had as quickly as Science tells them go! Catholic charnel
houses and bathrooms with glass walls where priests watch nuns
masturbate to liturgical chant? Muslims feasting on the hands of
little children? Women stoned by the crowd, with only their heads
protruding from the ground while the rest of their bodies are straight
down in the hole just dug. Their exposed skull getting battered - to
Death mind you, to Death - by the heaved stones of vicious and
sickening Allah drones? Is that all you want to hear, over and over the
dolloped outpourings, the muck of disgust and disaster? I can serve that
up to you, no problem! (The sound of water, flooding in, is heard. the
Doctor is swept off his feet by the current, and two men in a boat
float swiftly by while fighting that current with their feeble oars.
The lights then come back up, somehow returning us to the
carnival grounds from before. Children are crying on swings).
-
(Lights still up; stage goes clear and on walks the speaker, standing
before the cleared desk of the Doctor. Sitting on one side of the stage
are the Revolutionary War soldier, the Aunt-Jemima style servant, the
guy with the cigarette, Dr. Kerner, and a prison guard type.
The speaker, alone at center, begins reading):
'At the readymades where really there was nothing :
car tires and truck tires piled together, and the countless
juices of whatever slips through as rainwater and grease
and seepage and toil - all of that stuff below filthy windows
through which one could hardly see; and I knew that as I knew
the forcefield that kept it all going - up above the elevated highway,
falling apart and crack-crumbling, where the vehicles flowed like
emanations from Lothar's Evil Kingdom or somesuch drivel by
a rabble-rousing fate. But within myself I felt nonetheless settled
and in one place, where I wanted to be. And the river-wide smokes of a
few fires and factories - the sort of stuff that fouls a river drips its poison
into the water uses the water as a runoff stream of filth and vile -
they curled over the mad Hoboken horizon far across from me
and even though now maybe it's all gone, back then, back here where
I'm speaking of, the Vietnam-killer-force incremental dread and
and all its matter ran on through morning light and afternoon brilliance.
The slow shading of dusk like death towards evening - nothing left but
loud voices and he enchantments of anger : girls in crystal berets
parading from Canal with fatigue-wearing guys as fatigued as their
clothing : weaponry on display and all that mad revolution in the
air going nowhere and the shouts and slogans of idiots countered by
the shouts and slogans of idiots from the other side. I paraded Broadway.
I got dragged to Whitehall. I was tortured and taken in and then
thrown right back out. Incendiary 1967 nighttime daytime unreason
kill-a-cop torture-a-prisoner wipe the slate clean reasoning, the
kind the Government would use to make a point. But without
involvement I walked away from everything unattached and I
cared nothing for the makers nor what it was they made :
train tracks lying in wait, the daily commuters hoarding
their briefcases, time struggling lowly over stairways and
doorways and stepping over whatever in the way could
hinder them. The fine sheeted girls who passed by, looking
for all the world like young mirrors of lovely time, while the
men dragged through their muck carrying both their
own time and the maggot-infested regrets they kept :
slime-ridden memories, military-cap-wearing soldiers, on leave,
playing something, anything, along 42nd street bowling lanes and ski-ball
outlets; walking sideways through the hookers and fags and whores on
display, while cops twirled their sticks and the maddened Black Muslims
hawked their papers and scorched their pavements, and in that
dark December night it always seemed that -
no matter where I was in whatever part of town -
what came to the fore was the Lie that all existence was
NOTHING more than a Lie shading and wrongly filtering
everything we think and do and assume to be,
and all that's left when the final dawn does
finally break is the strange confusing red
sky of another morning just waking to be.'
(Stage goes dark, to silence).
-
'In the long, intangible night of silence which I undergo
there is nothing ever that brings me back to face the true
reality, or what it is, at least, said to be.' The Doctor is
sitting by the desk. He speaks 'That's complete nonsense and
you really must think - where have you been and what have you
done to warrant these types of feelings about yourself and onto
yourself. It's not clear to me that you're not yet simply striving
for a greater acceptance.' This sort of sparring seems to go on
often enough, and I'm never sure by it if he's really trying to
tell me something in a professional manner or just squirming with
the idea that he feels, instead, that he has to have something to say.
If that's the case, of course, it makes a mockery of his entire and
professed reason for professional being.
-
(Darkness remains on stage. No lights, no sound. Carrying
a lit candle, a form enters from right, muttering and talking
to, apparently, only itself. Wearing the robes of an ermine-clad
King, apparently crazed, the figure stalks about, muttering and
stammering. 'Form, matter and meaning. Oh, no, nothing of it.
Why am I here walking about in this strange darkness? Alone,
yet I feel so many things, as if a crowd myself. Oh gibber, oh my!
Maddening all this is and, yes, yet, no had I been born a pauper
would I feel these same things? So dark, so needless. What's the
why and why's the what? Need help! Need help! Can't be saved!').
-
Sometimes it just got like that : we'd talk past each other, seemingly,
both intent on getting across some pre-determined point and, in
doing so, never really listening to the other's words. 'A mechanism
in place of an organism' - I'd found that one day in a book I was
reading, and it was from a letter written by Neal Cassady to Allen
Ginsberg, and I mentioned it to no real avail, even though Kerner
did ask me to bring it back whole the next time I came, which I did:
'Scientific psychology has worked out for itself a complete system
of images in which it moves with entire conviction. The individual
pronouncements of every individual psychologist proves on
examination to be merely a variation of this system, comfortable
to the style of their world science of the day...like everything else
that is no longer becoming but become, it has put mechanism in
the place of organism.' Well he didn't think to much of it, but why
would he? It was in fact targeting his very operational outlook. It
took full aim at his school of thought, all these psychologist and sit-down
psychiatry people going about their business. To me, however, it did
then and does now make perfect sense - and in fact seems to have a
nice grasp on the matter. Yes, things go dead, become static, once
established. Just as any revolution, after the revolution, is by
definition in real trouble, so too the vibrant and swelling school(s)
of psychological thought and procedure has stultified into frozen
patterns and sects of their own, places from which each participant
(doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist, social worker) carefully operated -
in a strict and laborious adherence to their chosen field of reference
and sect. No further magics sought or included. I understood all that.
It was perfectly clear to me. Why the good Doctor Kerner could not
was clear and understandable to me. 'Defensive mechanism', let's say.
-
-
Doctor speaks : 'Your nice little vignette is very nice indeed, and - oh by the
way - you've got that Frost quote exactly reversed, do you know that?
It's actually 'before the land was ours, we were the land's' and I do
hope that would make some form of a difference to you in this telling. No?
Then no, OK. I guess that's alright with me as well. Frankly, I wouldn't care.'
-
'In the long, intangible night of silence which I undergo
there is nothing ever that brings me back to face the true
reality, or what it is, at least, said to be.' The Doctor is
sitting by the desk. He speaks 'That's complete nonsense and
you really must think - where have you been and what have you
done to warrant these types of feelings about yourself and onto
yourself. It's not clear to me that you're not yet simply striving
for a greater acceptance.' This sort of sparring seems to go on
often enough, and I'm never sure by it if he's really trying to
tell me something in a professional manner or just squirming with
the idea that he feels, instead, that he has to have something to say.
If that's the case, of course, it makes a mockery of his entire and
professed reason for professional being.
-
(Darkness remains on stage. No lights, no sound. Carrying
a lit candle, a form enters from right, muttering and talking
to, apparently, only itself. Wearing the robes of an ermine-clad
King, apparently crazed, the figure stalks about, muttering and
stammering. 'Form, matter and meaning. Oh, no, nothing of it.
Why am I here walking about in this strange darkness? Alone,
yet I feel so many things, as if a crowd myself. Oh gibber, oh my!
Maddening all this is and, yes, yet, no had I been born a pauper
would I feel these same things? So dark, so needless. What's the
why and why's the what? Need help! Need help! Can't be saved!').
-
Sometimes it just got like that : we'd talk past each other, seemingly,
both intent on getting across some pre-determined point and, in
doing so, never really listening to the other's words. 'A mechanism
in place of an organism' - I'd found that one day in a book I was
reading, and it was from a letter written by Neal Cassady to Allen
Ginsberg, and I mentioned it to no real avail, even though Kerner
did ask me to bring it back whole the next time I came, which I did:
'Scientific psychology has worked out for itself a complete system
of images in which it moves with entire conviction. The individual
pronouncements of every individual psychologist proves on
examination to be merely a variation of this system, comfortable
to the style of their world science of the day...like everything else
that is no longer becoming but become, it has put mechanism in
the place of organism.' Well he didn't think to much of it, but why
would he? It was in fact targeting his very operational outlook. It
took full aim at his school of thought, all these psychologist and sit-down
psychiatry people going about their business. To me, however, it did
then and does now make perfect sense - and in fact seems to have a
nice grasp on the matter. Yes, things go dead, become static, once
established. Just as any revolution, after the revolution, is by
definition in real trouble, so too the vibrant and swelling school(s)
of psychological thought and procedure has stultified into frozen
patterns and sects of their own, places from which each participant
(doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist, social worker) carefully operated -
in a strict and laborious adherence to their chosen field of reference
and sect. No further magics sought or included. I understood all that.
It was perfectly clear to me. Why the good Doctor Kerner could not
was clear and understandable to me. 'Defensive mechanism', let's say.
-
And oh by such provincial thoughts did I get by - reading about Indian
occupations of 1964, Alcatraz's first invasion, the budding movements, the
expansion of federal grip - all of those things just then slowly started :
(a curtain comes up, with music playing, broad, sweeping music, while a
travel-film plays - vistas, crops waving golden in the sunlight, in the
distance hills and mountains, rivers and streams, a few cabins along the
wooded edges. The voiceover intones Robert Frost and Robert Service,
words about great places and sensitive lands - 'we were the land's before the
land was ours' and all that. The scene shifts then quickly to rice-paddy
Vietnam scenes, rapid machine-gun fire and the rotor-slap-whine of
three in-formation Huey helicoptors coming in) : 'This is all I have to offer,
America! The sewage of Europe does not flow through these veins.'
occupations of 1964, Alcatraz's first invasion, the budding movements, the
expansion of federal grip - all of those things just then slowly started :
(a curtain comes up, with music playing, broad, sweeping music, while a
travel-film plays - vistas, crops waving golden in the sunlight, in the
distance hills and mountains, rivers and streams, a few cabins along the
wooded edges. The voiceover intones Robert Frost and Robert Service,
words about great places and sensitive lands - 'we were the land's before the
land was ours' and all that. The scene shifts then quickly to rice-paddy
Vietnam scenes, rapid machine-gun fire and the rotor-slap-whine of
three in-formation Huey helicoptors coming in) : 'This is all I have to offer,
America! The sewage of Europe does not flow through these veins.'
Doctor speaks : 'Your nice little vignette is very nice indeed, and - oh by the
way - you've got that Frost quote exactly reversed, do you know that?
It's actually 'before the land was ours, we were the land's' and I do
hope that would make some form of a difference to you in this telling. No?
Then no, OK. I guess that's alright with me as well. Frankly, I wouldn't care.'
-
A roiling rainstorm is heard outside, the lights flicker.
'I visited the quarries outside my hometown. The digs still
go on, almost in secret they pile drive and blast the nearby
hills and in so disfiguring them they truck away countless tons
of earth rock. It's gets chopped and peppered into all sorts
of various sizes of landscape rock and the usual stupid-size
boulders you see placed around parking lots and architectured
office buildings. Supposed to add genteel charm and class
to the surroundings. It's all garbage, but no one cares. When I was
young, it used to make me sad to sit and watch from a distance at
all this work - ripping the earth for nothing so much as another form
of human junk. I'd sit in secret places, unseen, through holes in the
off-limits fences, and just watch. Sometimes with others, but they
all thought it was fun, an adventure for kids. I saw differently. It's
the entrapment of the human spirit in the activity of destruction
and clamor - the complete opposite of why we're placed here, to
safeguard and husband the land and places around us. But no one
ever cared. If the morons ever reached Heaven, they'd blast right
through it so see what they could use. Is that the human spirit? Is
that the essence of life? I hope not, and if it is - if this quizzical,
mechanical curiosity is to be counted as a plus, then count me out.
I want nothing to do with that. Additionally, if it's your domain, and
the one you're defending, then screw you and screw your silly
profession. You're sitting here trying to delve my feelings, and
in turn disprove my sensitivities because they don't fit your
patterned narrative. Forward motion. Progress. Advancement.
All that.'
Part 4
One time I really did have to ask the doctor how to make a part, a 'section',
how to, what I meant, 'separate' the sections and he said 'Just keep on going
like this, you're doing fine.' You see, he had been having me turn in to him
each time whatever pages I could write during the intervening week which
would touch upon things we'd been or would be talking about. He really had
no idea about how simple that was for me (since I'd always been doing that
anyway, unbeknownst of course to him), and I'd surprised him both
with my regularity of writing and with the length and volume of it. But, I
always did think that was one of the faults or stupidities of any of this
'therapy' stuff - the notion that someone outside of you yourself is able to
sit in judgment of the 'you' of you merely by observing and listening, from
'outside', to what 'you' say about yourself. There are too many intervening
concepts involved to make that really work, and besides that it's really
all conjectural and cerebral anyway. There are too many assumptions
underway at any one time to make it work. Like, what is the 'you' of 'you'
which is supposed to be getting examined anyway? And who is this rather
presumptuous professional fool who assumes the rule of self-law so
as to represent the 'judgment' over which you yourself then are to show
some form of allegiance? And what is 'judgment' from outside anyway (and,
Jesus, has not all Mankind already had enough of that crap all these years
over?), and what is allegience. And when I talk about something,
when I say 'water' or 'glass' or 'doubt' or' fear' or any of that, how am
I sure he means the same thing that I mean by referring to the concept
I'm meaning? It's all fakery anyway - he's involved in some ridiculous
form of false pride and professional lordship over an assumed underling as
myself, and I, in turn, look at him as a mere representative of an entire adult
and professional world and culture and worldview and even 'religion' which
has done nothing but screw up reality all these long years anyway. So, I
went, I guess, along for the ride and had a hard time not smirking,
not being arrogant, not throwing the saddle over the log-fence and forcing
his ass to ride instead of mine. I mean, let's really look at all this.
Let's, really. (Light cuts to bright yellow, with ominous music
welling up as scene changes to a medical table with drills, saws, knives
and medical apparatus. Scene fades away, stage goes momentarily dark).
-
'I am not a carnivore no not at all though there are moments my
crazed hunger for meat and animal flesh leads me to kill stalk and
pester and what do you think of that?' (Crazed noble doctor stands up and
declaims 'a part of me, sincere, wants to see you as crazy and past the
safe edge but another part - the twinkling part the part with interests
everywhere - keeps me right here to merely listen - you see stupendous
things as you are trite and dangerous at the same time.
Quite the intrigue this is, to keep me here.') ...
-
We see the stage open to a daylight scene,
a small general store, simply lit, with candy and small goods arrayed and
a small boy reaching up for penny candies, a handful. The boy says 'I have
to get a newspaper for my Father, 5 cents, The Daily News, he wants to
read the baseball notes, like he does every day.' The clerk reaches over the
boy and grabs a paper; giving it to him he says 'Tell your Dad I said hello;
boy that Maris and Mantle together they are some team right!'. The
boy nods and quickly goes off. The scene darkens. A voice is heard:
'That was me, for my routine, I'd do that all Summer long back then.
'Dad had no work, it must have been 1960, '61, I can't remember. All
we did all Summer was look at baseball and scores, and then I'd run off
with the kids and we'd play more baseball down at the school yard; block
against block, different groups of kids stupidly vying against one another
for no real reason - just like in the Winter, with snowball fights block
against block - though they were really different, more like warfare,
we'd slaughter and maim and really go nuts with the ice and snow. It was
perfect, like having a murder weapon that no one could trace, it would all
melt away, the icicle you maimed with, just melting away.'
-
'Are you sure you recall the things you are saying, or have they been
added afterward, based on your life experiences since?' I was
flabbergasted just in the hearing of that question. 'I can't believe
you're going to sit there and tell me this.' I wanted to go on and
tell him lots of other things, but at that moment I was too beside
myself to argue correctly about anything. (A bell rings twice.
Lights remain on once again; thin, weak yellow, but steady light).
Speaker walks front, center : 'I have determined this to be a
self-perfecting reality, one that we are engaged in constantly by the
simple fact (not simple at all of course) of our creating, each
moment, the reality-progression we seek : self-healing skin, a cocoon
around us both pliable and strong enough, holding in everything needed
and, at the same time, able to regenerate and repair itself in due and
ample time, mostly unbeknownst to us - all this working and changing
and healing, the substance of our own presence, the fabric which holds
us. Consciousness does not precisely take this in, so that we are for the
most part unaware at any one time of this substance being and occurring.
That is but one of the 'magics' of this life - an illusionary passage through
structured totality which is completely unstructured until we make it so,
or bring it forth, by cooperating with it. Even if so unconsciously. It
blossoms invisibly as the flower blossoms from bud to bloom.'
(By this point, they are both sitting separately on simple, hardback
wooden chairs placed alongside each other at center stage.
The speaker continues...).
Part 5
-Recitatif-
-(Annihilating all that's made : a green
thought in a great green shade.)-
'The horror of unbearable things is that one comes to see God as Destroyer,
in the roll of some horrific force out to avenge, in the most petty way, codes
not enforced, or crazed, psychotic rules not followed. Why would this be
so except that - as a tribal, war God - in its earliest attributions this is how
that concept had first been visualized by Man on Earth; followed later, of
course, by a completely different and more societal version of a civilized
'God' much more serene and orderly, far less rapacious, far more comforting
and sorrowful. Instead of the old warrior/avenger God crazily going after
rules of Its own making, we have the other extreme, the sacrificial-lamb
God, laid back and comforting, who has - supposedly, in this narrative -
given back of Itself to the benefit and Mankind (and then of course,
just as mysteriously disappearing from the affairs of Man, having
been curiously supplanted by Powers of more secular and temporal
natures with their own boffo and curious claims to things : Kingship,
Rights of Kings, Royal Lineages, Fiefdoms and governmental forces
and decrees replete with all the trappings of power and enforced the
limitations of Religion). Don't you see, Herr Doktor, how it is all
THAT which is truly crazy and out of order? Men being asked to
sacrifice their lives for endless layers of conditional fantasy?'
-
'I wouldn't want to break you, send a fist right to your face, a
brutal boot deep into your rear, but very often it occurs that these
things become necessary and the only way by which to impart not
the values themselves but the way in which they are being violated
to the mind of another. It a very direct way of experiencing the task at
hand; something like 'do or die' and, don't get me wrong, again those
old, tradeworn cliches do manage to give us a form of the manner in
which old thinking once operated : the force of the cannon shed, the
power of the assaultive indictment, the force of absolute and final
result, and I use them only as example, for these are more
exalted times and we live with different brains now and a
consciousness totally transformed. I cannot tell you how
it breathes, but perhaps your gloried 'scientists' can.'
-
A screen behind them begins projecting a noisy, almost riotous, crowded
bar scene; the two turn about, entranced, to view it, without speaking.
Viewing the projection, they listen to all the noise and bustle and song:
-
'Who remembers where we're going?'
'Chocolate broom? Paulette wanted to beat it...with a broom, but
who said what about chocolate? She wanted to beat all things,
even those impaired; false idols and the saints at their grottos.'
-
'The imperfections of man are such that I could probably
understand; even those guys back at McGovern's in Newark,
remember those workers, sitting in their union meeting room at
the back, all kingly and high, 30 men all nursing their beer? A real
falsetto contingent of gangsters, they was, sitting around pounding down
the swill all the while thinking of all that they have and still wanting more :
money and dues and each other's wives and pathetic second homes at
the Jersey shore where their filthy sons and daughters hang out.'
'Hey, hey, you know that little dead-end street Eddie lives on? I
just found out all his neighbors call him the Japanese Landlord, but
nobody knows why! What the Hell's with that?
......(end of Act One).....
--
ACT TWO
Stage opens on emptiness, with a few bare lightbulbs shining
on the bare, wood floor. A few people scurry around and leave,
and an Italian man, using a broom along the floor, begins to
talk of his earliest days as a youth, coming to America. A
simple, old European music plays in the background,
soothing yet morose, carnivalesque, yet dour.....
'Gone then to America then, and for so as to be
a crook, the big American kind, the kind of crook
that's a hoodlum big enough to take a ferry boat and run it
and then own it and then own ten and then control the
ferry service all around and then own as well all the
booze to serve and all the women to bite to boot -
that's where I always said I was going and that's where I
got and that's where I am and that's the ghost as well of
Giovanni Malicendo known to you as John Maylicint
Fairweather III, if you don't mind, himself reporting
back to all of you somehow on all of what's occurred and
I'm going to live some days in a bawdy house the kind
with curtains and windows and the women who cook and
clean and sew and do all the rest too and they sing all the time
and I'm coming to America just like I said just to do those things
and see the big money and the statues on the wharves and the
military guards who stand in the harbor watching - for submarines
and fire-boats and puffs of deep-sea smoke the monsters rising
up from the old and ancient and European oceans - no more
of the old stuff for me and I'm taking a field-house maybe
in a watery Mountainville cabin where I'm going to live
on a farm or then maybe a sea-shanty shack along the old
Jersey shore with an open sand-pit front and a fire-pot out
back and I'm going to live for all the tar and strangeness in
the world to find me - those midnight fires on the beach
of stone or the mountain walkways and a hilltop home and
just like the American says 'I choose' this place this day
this freedom this space and all its wide and open happiness
wherever it is found and anyway I'm going to America for that.
-
Set goes dark, a quiet music plays in the
background over a dimly, half-lit stage.
These voices are heard, with the title '(Perambulator)':
'I've found the very best spot to be,' the man said, idly sitting down,
'next to the barrier, next to the Plunkett tree. And I've meant every word
I've ever said, and just as well, too.' I myself had walked over from
Lance Grove, just to wonder about things - how'd I ever get in this
location, what is all this infernal noise and words, ever, everyday
and always. Mexican midgets and their leaf-blowing trees, these
killers crawl on their hands and knees, cutting things and trimming with
noise while they know not a thing. That yapping tongue, that laughter,
all that need and use. Like the landing of an alien nation. "Yep, seems
they're immune to all that they ruin - they don't know the land yet
they come here to wreck it.' It was the comfy-man again, talking wildly
now and reading my thoughts. Speaking to me. 'I've been in places where
they'd be jailed. Cutting the King's tree is a crime, trimming on his land,
poaching his stand. Truly traumatic, y'understand? If these bastards
only knew; they'd run and hide. I was actually an executioner
once - they'd never even be tried, just cut and parceled and killed
by a lance. King John never cared. They wouldn't have a chance.' I
located his image in my chamber of horrors glass - it was old
old Malcolm Furit and it was (as well) 1218. These were
actually people he'd really have seen. 'I sit down gratuitously and I
hear your tale,' I said. 'I'm nodding and listening, and then
I realize - once again - I've crossed that little cone barrier past
where I've seen your face, and entered your visit and entered
your space.' A spat of silence followed, then this - 'Well, yes,
yes, your multi-dimensional aspects once more have come
to the fore - sit back now with me and let's watch,
and I'll talk as you listen....all this, you understand, goes on at
once, concurrent, with no real time or sequence. That's all false,
you see. Time has no limits and just runs on. It is not fixed,
not a 'set commodity', you see. It changes its own perception,
elongates, and doubles back. But anyway, it isn't really 'Time' -
what you call it - it just is its own limiting presence,
something that goes with all the others, takes its pride
in blending in. You read it as a line, but it's more like a wave.
And it brings us to this pass; another place, indeed. But lo!
We can talk here at least. We swim through it, we speak it,
we dream it, and - move along - let us watch - for we are, you see,
both the actors within the play while yet, the writers of all we say.
Remarkable moments, all these. And look - from what lineage
does this gardener girl come? Her father was a mountain man, her
mother baked cakes. Her brother, in fact, right now, is a lighting
engineer - just goes to show. She wheedles the loves of leaves
and flowers with those two quite tidy hands. Takes care of these
lands. I often sit and watch her, why just to sit and watch - all the
makings of a talisman, here to stay. Just as quickly,
then, it all disappeared.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part 4
One time I really did have to ask the doctor how to make a part, a 'section',
how to, what I meant, 'separate' the sections and he said 'Just keep on going
like this, you're doing fine.' You see, he had been having me turn in to him
each time whatever pages I could write during the intervening week which
would touch upon things we'd been or would be talking about. He really had
no idea about how simple that was for me (since I'd always been doing that
anyway, unbeknownst of course to him), and I'd surprised him both
with my regularity of writing and with the length and volume of it. But, I
always did think that was one of the faults or stupidities of any of this
'therapy' stuff - the notion that someone outside of you yourself is able to
sit in judgment of the 'you' of you merely by observing and listening, from
'outside', to what 'you' say about yourself. There are too many intervening
concepts involved to make that really work, and besides that it's really
all conjectural and cerebral anyway. There are too many assumptions
underway at any one time to make it work. Like, what is the 'you' of 'you'
which is supposed to be getting examined anyway? And who is this rather
presumptuous professional fool who assumes the rule of self-law so
as to represent the 'judgment' over which you yourself then are to show
some form of allegiance? And what is 'judgment' from outside anyway (and,
Jesus, has not all Mankind already had enough of that crap all these years
over?), and what is allegience. And when I talk about something,
when I say 'water' or 'glass' or 'doubt' or' fear' or any of that, how am
I sure he means the same thing that I mean by referring to the concept
I'm meaning? It's all fakery anyway - he's involved in some ridiculous
form of false pride and professional lordship over an assumed underling as
myself, and I, in turn, look at him as a mere representative of an entire adult
and professional world and culture and worldview and even 'religion' which
has done nothing but screw up reality all these long years anyway. So, I
went, I guess, along for the ride and had a hard time not smirking,
not being arrogant, not throwing the saddle over the log-fence and forcing
his ass to ride instead of mine. I mean, let's really look at all this.
Let's, really. (Light cuts to bright yellow, with ominous music
welling up as scene changes to a medical table with drills, saws, knives
and medical apparatus. Scene fades away, stage goes momentarily dark).
-
'I am not a carnivore no not at all though there are moments my
crazed hunger for meat and animal flesh leads me to kill stalk and
pester and what do you think of that?' (Crazed noble doctor stands up and
declaims 'a part of me, sincere, wants to see you as crazy and past the
safe edge but another part - the twinkling part the part with interests
everywhere - keeps me right here to merely listen - you see stupendous
things as you are trite and dangerous at the same time.
Quite the intrigue this is, to keep me here.') ...
-
We see the stage open to a daylight scene,
a small general store, simply lit, with candy and small goods arrayed and
a small boy reaching up for penny candies, a handful. The boy says 'I have
to get a newspaper for my Father, 5 cents, The Daily News, he wants to
read the baseball notes, like he does every day.' The clerk reaches over the
boy and grabs a paper; giving it to him he says 'Tell your Dad I said hello;
boy that Maris and Mantle together they are some team right!'. The
boy nods and quickly goes off. The scene darkens. A voice is heard:
'That was me, for my routine, I'd do that all Summer long back then.
'Dad had no work, it must have been 1960, '61, I can't remember. All
we did all Summer was look at baseball and scores, and then I'd run off
with the kids and we'd play more baseball down at the school yard; block
against block, different groups of kids stupidly vying against one another
for no real reason - just like in the Winter, with snowball fights block
against block - though they were really different, more like warfare,
we'd slaughter and maim and really go nuts with the ice and snow. It was
perfect, like having a murder weapon that no one could trace, it would all
melt away, the icicle you maimed with, just melting away.'
-
'Are you sure you recall the things you are saying, or have they been
added afterward, based on your life experiences since?' I was
flabbergasted just in the hearing of that question. 'I can't believe
you're going to sit there and tell me this.' I wanted to go on and
tell him lots of other things, but at that moment I was too beside
myself to argue correctly about anything. (A bell rings twice.
Lights remain on once again; thin, weak yellow, but steady light).
Speaker walks front, center : 'I have determined this to be a
self-perfecting reality, one that we are engaged in constantly by the
simple fact (not simple at all of course) of our creating, each
moment, the reality-progression we seek : self-healing skin, a cocoon
around us both pliable and strong enough, holding in everything needed
and, at the same time, able to regenerate and repair itself in due and
ample time, mostly unbeknownst to us - all this working and changing
and healing, the substance of our own presence, the fabric which holds
us. Consciousness does not precisely take this in, so that we are for the
most part unaware at any one time of this substance being and occurring.
That is but one of the 'magics' of this life - an illusionary passage through
structured totality which is completely unstructured until we make it so,
or bring it forth, by cooperating with it. Even if so unconsciously. It
blossoms invisibly as the flower blossoms from bud to bloom.'
(By this point, they are both sitting separately on simple, hardback
wooden chairs placed alongside each other at center stage.
The speaker continues...).
Part 5
-Recitatif-
-(Annihilating all that's made : a green
thought in a great green shade.)-
'The horror of unbearable things is that one comes to see God as Destroyer,
in the roll of some horrific force out to avenge, in the most petty way, codes
not enforced, or crazed, psychotic rules not followed. Why would this be
so except that - as a tribal, war God - in its earliest attributions this is how
that concept had first been visualized by Man on Earth; followed later, of
course, by a completely different and more societal version of a civilized
'God' much more serene and orderly, far less rapacious, far more comforting
and sorrowful. Instead of the old warrior/avenger God crazily going after
rules of Its own making, we have the other extreme, the sacrificial-lamb
God, laid back and comforting, who has - supposedly, in this narrative -
given back of Itself to the benefit and Mankind (and then of course,
just as mysteriously disappearing from the affairs of Man, having
been curiously supplanted by Powers of more secular and temporal
natures with their own boffo and curious claims to things : Kingship,
Rights of Kings, Royal Lineages, Fiefdoms and governmental forces
and decrees replete with all the trappings of power and enforced the
limitations of Religion). Don't you see, Herr Doktor, how it is all
THAT which is truly crazy and out of order? Men being asked to
sacrifice their lives for endless layers of conditional fantasy?'
-
'I wouldn't want to break you, send a fist right to your face, a
brutal boot deep into your rear, but very often it occurs that these
things become necessary and the only way by which to impart not
the values themselves but the way in which they are being violated
to the mind of another. It a very direct way of experiencing the task at
hand; something like 'do or die' and, don't get me wrong, again those
old, tradeworn cliches do manage to give us a form of the manner in
which old thinking once operated : the force of the cannon shed, the
power of the assaultive indictment, the force of absolute and final
result, and I use them only as example, for these are more
exalted times and we live with different brains now and a
consciousness totally transformed. I cannot tell you how
it breathes, but perhaps your gloried 'scientists' can.'
-
A screen behind them begins projecting a noisy, almost riotous, crowded
bar scene; the two turn about, entranced, to view it, without speaking.
Viewing the projection, they listen to all the noise and bustle and song:
-
'Who remembers where we're going?'
'Chocolate broom? Paulette wanted to beat it...with a broom, but
who said what about chocolate? She wanted to beat all things,
even those impaired; false idols and the saints at their grottos.'
-
'The imperfections of man are such that I could probably
understand; even those guys back at McGovern's in Newark,
remember those workers, sitting in their union meeting room at
the back, all kingly and high, 30 men all nursing their beer? A real
falsetto contingent of gangsters, they was, sitting around pounding down
the swill all the while thinking of all that they have and still wanting more :
money and dues and each other's wives and pathetic second homes at
the Jersey shore where their filthy sons and daughters hang out.'
'Hey, hey, you know that little dead-end street Eddie lives on? I
just found out all his neighbors call him the Japanese Landlord, but
nobody knows why! What the Hell's with that?
......(end of Act One).....
--
ACT TWO
Stage opens on emptiness, with a few bare lightbulbs shining
on the bare, wood floor. A few people scurry around and leave,
and an Italian man, using a broom along the floor, begins to
talk of his earliest days as a youth, coming to America. A
simple, old European music plays in the background,
soothing yet morose, carnivalesque, yet dour.....
'Gone then to America then, and for so as to be
a crook, the big American kind, the kind of crook
that's a hoodlum big enough to take a ferry boat and run it
and then own it and then own ten and then control the
ferry service all around and then own as well all the
booze to serve and all the women to bite to boot -
that's where I always said I was going and that's where I
got and that's where I am and that's the ghost as well of
Giovanni Malicendo known to you as John Maylicint
Fairweather III, if you don't mind, himself reporting
back to all of you somehow on all of what's occurred and
I'm going to live some days in a bawdy house the kind
with curtains and windows and the women who cook and
clean and sew and do all the rest too and they sing all the time
and I'm coming to America just like I said just to do those things
and see the big money and the statues on the wharves and the
military guards who stand in the harbor watching - for submarines
and fire-boats and puffs of deep-sea smoke the monsters rising
up from the old and ancient and European oceans - no more
of the old stuff for me and I'm taking a field-house maybe
in a watery Mountainville cabin where I'm going to live
on a farm or then maybe a sea-shanty shack along the old
Jersey shore with an open sand-pit front and a fire-pot out
back and I'm going to live for all the tar and strangeness in
the world to find me - those midnight fires on the beach
of stone or the mountain walkways and a hilltop home and
just like the American says 'I choose' this place this day
this freedom this space and all its wide and open happiness
wherever it is found and anyway I'm going to America for that.
-
Set goes dark, a quiet music plays in the
background over a dimly, half-lit stage.
These voices are heard, with the title '(Perambulator)':
'I've found the very best spot to be,' the man said, idly sitting down,
'next to the barrier, next to the Plunkett tree. And I've meant every word
I've ever said, and just as well, too.' I myself had walked over from
Lance Grove, just to wonder about things - how'd I ever get in this
location, what is all this infernal noise and words, ever, everyday
and always. Mexican midgets and their leaf-blowing trees, these
killers crawl on their hands and knees, cutting things and trimming with
noise while they know not a thing. That yapping tongue, that laughter,
all that need and use. Like the landing of an alien nation. "Yep, seems
they're immune to all that they ruin - they don't know the land yet
they come here to wreck it.' It was the comfy-man again, talking wildly
now and reading my thoughts. Speaking to me. 'I've been in places where
they'd be jailed. Cutting the King's tree is a crime, trimming on his land,
poaching his stand. Truly traumatic, y'understand? If these bastards
only knew; they'd run and hide. I was actually an executioner
once - they'd never even be tried, just cut and parceled and killed
by a lance. King John never cared. They wouldn't have a chance.' I
located his image in my chamber of horrors glass - it was old
old Malcolm Furit and it was (as well) 1218. These were
actually people he'd really have seen. 'I sit down gratuitously and I
hear your tale,' I said. 'I'm nodding and listening, and then
I realize - once again - I've crossed that little cone barrier past
where I've seen your face, and entered your visit and entered
your space.' A spat of silence followed, then this - 'Well, yes,
yes, your multi-dimensional aspects once more have come
to the fore - sit back now with me and let's watch,
and I'll talk as you listen....all this, you understand, goes on at
once, concurrent, with no real time or sequence. That's all false,
you see. Time has no limits and just runs on. It is not fixed,
not a 'set commodity', you see. It changes its own perception,
elongates, and doubles back. But anyway, it isn't really 'Time' -
what you call it - it just is its own limiting presence,
something that goes with all the others, takes its pride
in blending in. You read it as a line, but it's more like a wave.
And it brings us to this pass; another place, indeed. But lo!
We can talk here at least. We swim through it, we speak it,
we dream it, and - move along - let us watch - for we are, you see,
both the actors within the play while yet, the writers of all we say.
Remarkable moments, all these. And look - from what lineage
does this gardener girl come? Her father was a mountain man, her
mother baked cakes. Her brother, in fact, right now, is a lighting
engineer - just goes to show. She wheedles the loves of leaves
and flowers with those two quite tidy hands. Takes care of these
lands. I often sit and watch her, why just to sit and watch - all the
makings of a talisman, here to stay. Just as quickly,
then, it all disappeared.
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