“To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greek, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest dinner.”
Thomas Fleming, age 6.
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
— Wallace Stevens
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.
It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife’s love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.
You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: “Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.” Sophocles’ Edipus, like Dostoevsky’s Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.
One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. “What!—by such narrow ways–?” There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. “I conclude that all is well,” says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
— Albert Camus
“I was oppressed with a sense of vague discontent and dissatisfaction with my own life, which was passing so quickly and uninterestingly, and I kept thinking it would be a good thing if I could tear my heart out of my breast, that heart which had grown so weary of life.” Anton Chekhov
Last week I had the immense pleasure of hanging out a few days with the wonderful Luk Perceval and his crew that are working on the play of Platonov for the NTGent theatre company.
All I can say is that you don’t want to miss this if you have the chance…
Recently American Theatre magazine asked its Facebook followers to recount their experiences, good or bad, with stage nudity. Their question brought to mind the following:
A few years ago I saw a production of The Cannibals where the actors deferred the requisite nudity at the end. I was appalled.
In George Tabori’s grotesque comedy, a Nazi officer promises survival to a group of starving concentration camp prisoners, provided they follow through with their desperate plan to cannibalize one of their own dead. Discovered and now faced with the choice, all but two choose to accept the gas chamber. They remove their prison-issued clothes and, in the production I saw, walk slowly downstairs through a trap in the floor. Except the actors (whom I knew) reversed their original acceptance of the stage directions and decided a week before opening they wouldn’t go completely naked, instead only stripping to their faded undergarments. What should have been a heart-wrenching and vivid reminder of inhumanity and sacrifice was rendered inert.
I agree that most stage nudity is gratuitous. But sometimes it is a moral imperative.
“You’re wrong,” is what I wanted to say. “You don’t give people a chance. You’re just a spoiled snobbish whining brat without the slightest concern for someone else’s problems.” That’s what I wanted to say. Instead I shook my head, grinned, and pretended to sympathize with the Irish girl—the ridiculous things she said.
In the cool departing daylight of late summer’s afternoon, seated outside at a corner café, I wanted it sweet. I was swirling my third cognac, getting ‘up to speed’ while Parisians flew past, allegro ma non troppo, moving like the Métro. I had dubbed this motion the Paris Sidewalk Surge. Even our café crowd raced, running a rapid chatter of demi-tasse and cigarette ash, making Paris al fresco like bathing with an immersed electrical appliance.
I sat with a young cousin who, for no valid reason, resented this stimulated city. Paris was such a drain upon her Irish Catholic colleen misty virtue, and you could be sure the Sisters never taught her ’bout the charging of the batteries. She could only sit, sparking static, dead in the water, turning her teaspoon blue. And I could only listen to complaints hiss forth like the painful escape of air from a balloon.
“Why is it that every time I’m waiting in line, someone steps in front of me? Yer man at the Berthillon, I swear, he almost pushed me over. I think he just wanted to put his hands on me…it’s like these people never heard of first come, first served.”
My mood blackened. It should have been sweet. Still I listened.
“…and it was so humiliating the way yer woman treated me, like I was an inconvenience because I wouldn’t speak French. Why do you have to speak French to buy a pair of shoes? It was a laugh to have her bring those boxes and leave without buying a thing. You should have seen the way she looked at me….”
No problem there. In the mind’s eye I saw the expression, but the mind’s eye blinked at a kind of interruption, not unusual, someone by our table. I was forced to say, “No, I’m not, I can’t give you an autograph…sorry. Have a nice day anyway.” The person left, a little embarrassed, maybe unconvinced that I was not the celebrity for whom they had mistaken me. Maggie shook her head and rolled her eyes. I grinned. The famous American film director disguise: baseball cap, sunglasses, and beard. Add the fact that I sat all confidence and impunity with a stunningly freckled strawberry blonde. It was so interesting to me—this counterfeit fame that made others approach. Maggie wouldn’t see it that way. An encounter outside her control, the impromptu brush with another life was to suffer a theft of distance: a dismal crime, a crack in the ice.
“Don’t you hate that? Having people stare at you, come up all the time, really, it would piss me off….”
I was about to tell her I liked it, it was fun, but that’s when a stranger leaned over to say, “You really do look like him.”
Maggie sighed.
I laughed. “Something I’m learning to live with.”
Why hadn’t I noticed the stranger sitting down next to us? This man was genuinely elegant—a rare quality these days. Suit with a vest and hightop leather shoes. Cravat and a Panama. It was well-worn class, charming and unexpected. His skin had the texture of nineteenth-century greasepaint. Character stubbled his cheek and jaw.
I found myself staring. Something about his features made me think of vintage nobility. Maybe his eyes, like an animated Dutch painting, glistening with alcoholic highlights yet penetrating and sure. Those eyes looked into mine. He saw me holding my breath. He smiled at that. He smiled and my perverse intuition sensed the show was just beginning. As his lips parted, a curtain pulled aside to reveal rotten, broken teeth, so shocking in the theater of his face. Maggie gasped.
“Excuse me,” she said, obviously upset. She rose bumping the table, escaping to what she hoped would be, in this precarious Paris, a safe toilette.
The man narrowed his eyes. “You’re not…really….”
A famous director? Holding my breath? “No, really, I’m not.”
“Of course you’re not.” He leaned back in his chair without taking his eyes from mine. Holding up a finger on a half-raised hand he invoked a waiter to appear miraculously. The elegant man whispered. The waiter, looking to the cap/the beard/the sunglasses, nodded then vanished into the chattering café.
The stranger kept staring at me. I wanted to break the awkward silence, but he spoke first.
“I’ve been here before.”
I nodded and mumbled, “Me too.”
He stared.
“Your English is very good,” I said.
“Your French is lousy,” he shot back.
Astonished I felt my face redden. “I don’t believe you’ve heard me speak French.”
“I don’t need to hear you speak…I can tell. Now…pay attention!” The last part he delivered like a slap. He cracked open a newspaper, hiding his face from view.
A moment passed. Two. What a bizarre exchange. A slight breeze made his newspaper tremble. Maybe he’s crazy. My finger swirled the top of my cognac glass. Suddenly, from somewhere deep within Le Monde, he spoke.
“Do you like Paris?”
“Yes, I….”
“Look across the street,” he said, cutting me short.
I looked.
“What do you see?”
“St. Germain-des-Prés…and some artists trying to sell their work and…” what the hell am I doing? ”…um, there’s a lot of people standing around, some of them are watching a mime, there’s also….”
“What is the mime doing?”
“Nothing, just standing there, frozen. People are putting coins in her hat….”
He cut me off again. “She’s a dancer, classically trained. Spent years at the barre. All she’s ever wanted from life was the freedom to dance, to move…and yet to live, to keep from starving, she makes her money by refusing to move.”
“Do you know her?”
“Across the street. Keep looking.”
I scanned the street and scaled the walls of the stony church with my eyes. Windows and window boxes. I caught a glimpse of movement then nothing more, so I looked back to the sidewalk. “There’s some person wearing a red and blue knit jumpsuit. He looks like a jester. He’s pulling tape off the fence.”
I waited. The elegant man replied.
“Oh, he thinks he’s Napoleon. The tape was left by artists who attach work there to sell. It makes Napoleon mad…they don’t clean up after themselves.”
This is really strange. He hasn’t looked up from his paper once. I felt an urgent need to get away. Break the spell. Instead I looked again across the street.
I saw something, or someone, that I had seen before. A man running. He was about thirty. He had a scrawny beard and a porkpie hat. His clothes were ratty, but only because they were old—probably old when he bought them. He carried a briefcase in one hand. His other hand dangled at his side. He ran at a trot. He didn’t smile. Wouldn’t smile. Never had smiled.
“He’s the Running Man,” said the voice behind the paper.
My voice was dry debris. “I’ve seen him before…in the Marais. He runs on the rue des Rosiers in the Jewish Quarter.” I looked toward the other voice, the one behind the paper. I wondered how he knew about the Running Man. I wondered how he could see him, buried in his paper. I wondered why his paper was upside down.
“How are you seeing that?” I asked.
“I’m not. I’m reading a newspaper…” He crushed it closed and dropped it onto the table, “…and it’s gotten dark.”
And it was dark, or almost was. The twilight that turns everything gray—city, street, buildings, people, the already gray pigeons that get even grayer. I blinked and his face was inches from mine.
“Pay attention,” he whispered with breath that smelled of every old book I’d ever read. “You won’t have to do much more than that.”
He turned his face to the stone-gray church, lost in thought or so it seemed, his eyes the color of something deep. He whispered, “There’s a moon tonight.”
Then he laughed and I almost pissed.
“Enjoy God’s Peep Show.” He stood up quickly, coffee unfinished, food untouched. He didn’t say goodbye—he was gone.
Maggie returned. “Oh, good, he’s gone. He was so weird.”
I remembered the special rush that comes after losing control of a car on ice.
“Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s go before he comes back.”
I made a move to signal the check and it arrived, miraculously. That is to say, they arrived. The checks.
“Excuse me,” I said in my, yes, lousy French. “There are two checks here.”
The waiter spoke conspicuous English. “The other gentleman said you would pay his bill as well.” The waiter stood waiting.
Maggie gasped, maybe spoke. I didn’t hear. I was looking across the street at that stony church, at its rows of blank dark windows. There was one window, underlined with geraniums, that had its curtains barely parted, revealing a room made dark by the dusk but not too dark to see the pink of flesh, the rosy priestly bottom backed against the glass—a holy moon. Black trousers rose to eclipse it then dropped again in a wicked game.
The curtains closed. I reached into my pocket and fumbled for coins. In spite of this double bill, in light of this double cross, I could only smile a new-found smile of absurd and frightening poetry.
“There’s a moon tonight.”
Trembling I reached to pay the checks.
“What are you doing?”
Shut up, Maggie, I’m paying attention.
© 1994 Craig Fleming
I have just re-read Dune by Frank Herbert. I love the chapter starters, which are quotations from fictional books that look back on the events of his story. Here’s one of my favorites:
“Many have marked the speed with which Muad’Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the others, we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.”
If there were one thing in teaching that frustrates me more than any other, it would be the perception among most of my students that learning is hard. Somewhere in their past they allowed themselves to be convinced that learning and playing were two different procedures, and so they persuade themselves they are bored, diverted from playing by the construct of the classroom, when playful curiosity is precisely what the classroom requires. And these are THEATRE students, or so they claim for themselves, yet they’ve compartmentalized that animating force, saving its expression only for the sanction of the occasional crowd, never realizing that without that quality in their daily life they do not earn the attentions for which they clamor. In most instances, I would rather watch a beagle onstage, agog, unselfconscious, and brimming with dynamic energy, than the empty shells who expect to be filled by my observing.
Then again, I have students who delight me every day. For them, I continue.
One of Merlyn’s speeches to Arthur:
“The cheek of the human race,” he exclaimed, “is something to knock you footless. Begin with the unthinkable universe; narrow down to the minute sun inside it; pass to the satellite of the sun we are pleased to call Earth; glance at the myriad algae, or whatever the things are called, of the sea, and at the uncountable microbes, going backwards to a minus infinity, which populate ourselves. Drop an eye on those quarter million other species which I have mentioned, and upon the unmentionable expanses of time through which they have lived. Then look at man, an upstart whose eyes, speaking from the point of view of Nature, are scarcely open further than the puppy’s. There he is, the—the gollywog—” He was becoming so excited that he had no time to think of epithets. “There he is dubbing himself Homo sapiens, forsooth, proclaiming himself the lord of creation, like that ass Napoleon putting on his own crown! There he is, condescending to the other animals: even condescending, God bless my soul and body, to his ancestors! It is the Great Victorian Hubris, the amazing, ineffable presumption of the nineteenth century. . . Man, proud man, stands here in the twentieth century, complacently believing that the race has ‘advanced’ in the course of a thousand miserable years, and busy blowing his brothers to bits. When will they learn that it takes a million years for a bird to modify a single one of its primary feathers? There he stands, the crashing lubber, pretending that everything is different because he has made an internal combustion engine. There he stands, ever since Darwin, because he has heard that there is such a thing as evolution. Quite regardless of the fact that evolution happens in million-year cycles, he thinks he has evolved since the Middle Ages. Perhaps the combustion engine has evolved, but not he. . . The sheer, shattering sauce of it! And making God in his own image! Believe me, the so-called primitive races who worshipped animals as gods were not so daft as people choose to pretend. At least they were humble. Why should not God have come to earth as an earthworm? There are a great many more worms than men, and they do a great deal more good. . . Do you know that it has been calculated that, during the years between 1100 and 1900, the English were at war for four hundred and nineteen years and the French for three hundred and seventy-three? . . . War, in Nature herself outside of man, is so much a rarity that it scarcely exists. In all those two hundred and fifty thousand species, there are only a dozen or so which go to war. If Nature ever troubled to look at man, the little atrocity, she would be shocked out of her wits.”
“The sky is random. Even calling it “sky”
is an attempt to make meaning, say,
a shape, from the humanly visible part
of shapelessness in endlessness. It’s what
we do, in some ways it’s entirely what
we do—and so the devastating rose
of a galaxy’s being born, the fatal lamé
of another’s being torn and dying, we frame
in the lenses of our super-duper telescopes the way
we would those other completely incomprehensible
fecund and dying subjects at a family picnic.
Making them “subjects.” “Rose.” “Lamé.” The way
our language scissors the enormity to scales
we can tolerate. The way we gild and rubricate
in memory, or edit out selectively.
An infant’s gentle snoring, even, apportions
the eternal. When they moved to the boonies,
Dorothy Wordsworth measured their walk
to Crewkerne—then the nearest town—
by pushing a device invented especially
for such a project, a “perambulator”: seven miles.
Her brother William pottered at his daffodils poem.
Ten thousand saw I at a glance: by which he meant
too many to count, but could only say it in counting.”
A note from me: In light of theatre’s myriad physical manifestations, we must ever accept that the word is equally physical, whether as incantatory lines on a page, or as vibrations arriving to the inner ear and evoking manifestations in the mind. It is through the word we irresistably find ourselves, “effing the ineffable.”
Cui Bono 