Sly Uses

Where’s the great light?

August 28th • Circe

11:32 pm

Who? Who? Are you blue? Oh its you, my little gnome. I should have expected you, darling, here between evil and deliverance. No no, come back here. I see you, come out. Lurking around your lair. Peering from your warren. Adorable. Don’t want to be seen here do you? Too many danger signals? Oh sweetheart, come dance with me, with all of us. Just a minute I have to take this. Si? Espera, mi amor, y yo estaré contigo. Alrededor detrás del establo. Sorry about that. You waited! Oh my love, dance with me. What’s that? Oh sweetheart, don’t you see I can’t hear you? Please, my soft soul of flowers, don’t be mislead by appearances, my eyes are larger than my ears! Let’s dance together ’till we’re dead or cured. Doesn’t matter which, gnomey, same difference really. Ah but what’s real here you want to know? This is the dance of delusion, my onliest, my lovey, my luring bird of Eden. We’ll tango through miserileading doors, and side with fuguist appearances. So how’d you get here? Must have been Elijah’s horses. Here, hold my pen. Let’s unhitch them, shall we? They’ll dance with us, they dance too you know, then my eagle will bring us a leg of a duck and we can insert it directly into our bodies. You’ll be delicious my diminutive one, my pigmy, my sweet smiling pestilence, my swan. We’ll bathe in my cauldron (mind that bubbling lead!) and emerge nice and clean and refreshed and as beautiful as a many colored bow and oh I see, you’re a bit stunted. Well, I’ll hold you up. Not a problem. And then and then

God: Ok, hold. Vitus, you’re far off script, and did you just take a call?

St. Vitus: [adjusting his peaked cap 180°] and then we’ll grind our teeth growl howl owl and growling and grinding and teeth ghahute, go first my plunder, go my prey, salute the west gone to rest, ghaghaest, go my guest, my stranger, my destitute, my sterile my wanting, you go my dear ghost, my soul, my demon or my angel, whichever, and then and then

God: Vitus. Vitus!

Jesus: Salute him with your left hand, that’s the password in his language.

The brave woman had manfully helped. She had.

August 20th • Oxen of the Sun

Luster and odors, and blossoms and flowers, All that is richest in gardens and bowers, teach us morality, speak of mortality, whisper that life is a swift unreality. 10:46 pm

Scene: [After a job quite happily and well done, those who have passed on, who have gone before are happy too as they gaze down and smile upon the touching scene.]

St. Anne: No matter how many times I see it, no matter how often I am summoned to the miracle that is birth, I can’t get past how disgusting it all is.

St. Margaret: Amen. And this one was a bleeder. Where’s the universal husband?

Father Cronion: I saw him just a bit ago. Finishing up a meal of baby fingers it looked like.

St. Margaret: Was he? Lord I’m hungry. We’ve been at this job for days.

St. Anne: Well isn’t it just like the Universal Husband to be absent just at the God! Oh God you’re here!

God: Did I miss it?

St. Anne: Not at all , not at all. Sir, to you my hand! A fine job you did here, well done.

God: None of that, none of that. It was down to the three of you the birth went off as well as it did. Looks a mess though.

St. Anne: We’ll send in a crew. Clean it up. Margaret?

St. Margaret: I’ll make a call. We’ve been a bit behind schedule

Father Cronion: Time did slip away from us. But we pulled it off in the end, didn’t we ladies. With of course Your intervention.

God: It was hard work all around, but my good and faithful servants, we soldiered it out and just look, we gave birth to a fine little mite! But yes, send in a crew to clean her up. And flowers. Lets get her some flowers, give her something to think about.

From what region of remoteness the whatness of our whoness hath fetched his whenceness

August 1st • Oxen of the Sun

10:15 pm

O Nobodaddy come and get me I am God! And basta, I am done. You’re not my daddy. You’re nobody’s daddy. Enough! Bring a stranger into our tower and now mine is the second best bed. Strangers at my gates! Sinning against my light. I starve and he waxes fat. Try and make me the slave of servants I am done, you hear me God! I am God! The son of a jalap merchant reeking of the land of milk and money. I know that assurfaction minorates atrocities but I won’t let myself get comfortable. I’m out! The kiss of ashes on my breath and that’s that. You hear me God? You are dead! You are beastly dead! I am God! I am tired of this shit. Everything is hidden and not where it should be. Life is a waxing and a waning and I am always and forever in the middle of the path of life no matter how fast or how slow or which direction or why. Where else is there or when? Birth me, bury me, the middle of the path is just as obsure as where we came from and whence we go. And when and where. God is running a short con and I’m the mark baby. It’s a shell game and you want to know what’s what, I am God! I’ll be making the meaning around here. Misdirect me if you think you can God, I’ll be the one who decides. I’m the daddy now baby I’m everybody’s daddy!

Ullhodturdenweirmudgaardgringnirurdrmolnirfenrirlukkilokkibaugimandodrrerinsurtkrinmgernrackinarockar!

Good Jesus Christ Mother of Fuck! What did he say? What did he say? What did he say about me?

The surface of a downward tending lutulent reality.

July 23rd • Oxen of the Sun

As the year ended omens of impending misfortune were widely rumored -- unprecedentedly frequent lightning; a comet (atoned for by Nero, as usual, by aristocratic blood); two-headed offspring of men and beasts, thrown into the streets or discovered among the offerings to those deities to whom pregnant victims are sacrificed. 10:00 pm

Scene: [In the Deshil Holles Eamus theatre. The stage is lit by one bright quickening wombfruit hanging expectantly from the downstage grid. God has canceled a rehearsal for his one deity show, and drifts in a southerly direction]

God: It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it, Jesus, I just think that other circumstances being equal, the measure of how far forward humanity may have progressed has little to do with my command or promise or whatever you’d like to call it to Adam and Eve.

Jesus: [Dancing clockwise around God] Its’ just that, if we don’t include it, then we leave the second act undeveloped, and by the time you start act three if it be absent when fortunately present nevertheless, there would be no more odious offense at all not to can be!

God: [Now dancing counterclockwise around Jesus] Listen. This is a sensitive topic for me. I gave them eternity! They received eternity, they were God’s mortals, and what did they want? Generation. So fine. Go forth. Multiply. Whatever. And look what happened. Barbarity.

Jesus: [slowing] And hospitals.

God: [quickening] More barbarity.

Jesus: You really should do something to fix it, or at least address it.

God: [Completing his ninth circumabigation of Jesus] What can I do? No. If they don’t tremble lest what had been conceived in the past be parturient of an overly proliferant future; lest they not feel the pains of it have been begun already, then basta! Enough! They got themselves into trouble; they’re on their own.

A star I see. Venus?

July 15th • Nausicaa

Say them all but tell them apart, cadenzando coloratura! R is Rubretta and A is Arancia, Y is for Yilla and N for greeneriN. B is Boyblue with odalisque O while W waters the fleurettes of novembrance. Though they're all but merely a schoolgirl yet these way went they. I' th' view o' th'avignue dancing goes entrancing roundly. 8:53 pm

[Scene: Rehearsal for Circe. Venus dressed as a heliotrope in furs is practicing the Dance of the Hours with the Roygbiv Vance dancers: Rose, Sevilla, Citronelle, Esmeralde, Pervinca, Indra, and Viola. The director is perched in the upstage grid and the stage manager and asm are in the booth. The nobleman, McIntosh, the newsboys, a hag carrying a bottle and Grace Darling are waiting stage right to rehearse their number: “O by the by that Lotion”]

God [On the god mic. Always on the damn god mic. Does he really need the entire house to hear him? Really?] I know the sun sets in the west Venus, I was the one who put it there in the first place!

Venus: The hell you were!

God: Nevermind the direction, this is theatre! Our business is illusion. We are representing truth, not telling it. Who bloody cares if the sun is setting in the Southeast?

Venus: I do! I need to absorb all the reality I can so my instrument can feel the very atmosphere of the scene. How can I do that if you move the sun to the wrong place?

God: Look, you think it’s easy to move the sun around? My joints are on the rack!

Jesus: Dad? Those distant hills seem coming nigh.

God: I know, they needed to be closer for this scene. Ignore them, the’ll stop soon.

Venus: Listen God, I need the light to set in the west: it is a kind of reassuring. I can’t. I can’t work like this.

[A feather falls slowly from the grid, lands on Venus’ head. She bursts into tears.]

Venus: [Addressing the bird in the grid] Thanks. You’ve always brought me such peace. You really are a promise of hope to me. The girls too. Sorry I got your names mixed up Indra, Viola.

Viola: Don’t worry about it love. Shall we go again?

McIntosh: Do already! The corns on my kismet are killing me!

Venus: Who is that guy?

God: Jesus?

Jesus: Nobody knows, he just showed up. Wait. Where did he go? Doesn’t he know it’s damn frustrating when people appear and disappear just like that!

God: Never mind him, he was probably just a mirage. Now Venus, the director wants you to practice in front of a mirror, hold his feather while you do it if it helps you.

Venus: There’s no way I can do that. I don’t want to see myself, that would shatter the reality I’m creating.

God: It’s hard I know, but still you learn something. We all could stand to see ourselves as other see us. That’s the way to find out. See yourself, scowl or smile, then ask yourself, who am I now? Will you try it?

Venus: Can I do it naked?

God: So long as women don’t mock what matter?

A visit to a house of mourning

June 16th • Wilderness

Even if the whole universe did not recollapse, there would be singularities in any localized regions that collapsed to form black holes. These singularities would be an end of time for anyone who fell into the black hole. At the big bang and other singularities, all the laws would have broken down, so God would still have had complete freedom to choose what happened and how the universe began. 6:07 pm

[Scene: The lights in the house are down except for one single lit candle sitting comfortably on a stool in the center of the stage. The candle gives off a darkness shining in brightness which brightness cannot comprehend.]

God [on the god mic]: Let me ask you this: is there a difference between the world as known by ordinary mortals and what they think might be my world? Well I’ll tell you, all the world’s a stage. What’s different from here to then? It depends on if you think mortality is about duration. Linear duration. And if you thus imagine my theatres exist in another kind of time entirely. Do you think that? Many have done before you. Well who am I to say when’s when. What’s the opposite of a line? I don’t know. I guess an all at once condition. Plenitude of being. That sort of thing.

Here, I’ll give you a piece of my mind. Wait. What? Aw, Jesus Christ! What did I say about headset chatter? Come on. What did you say?

Jesus [Appears on stage is if from nowhere and talks to the booth]: I said, maybe here is where we should put in that bit about number. You know, the insertion between acts 1 and 2.

God [on the god mic]: That? Come on. Even the director thinks it’s crap.

[Bird excrement falls from the grid, lands on the candle and puts it out. A faint but increasing luminosity of ruby light becomes gradually visible].

Jesus: I get it. Can we at least try it? For Bloom’s sake?

God [on the god mic]: Bloowho? Oh him! Yes. Yeah. He’s in a bit of a black hole right now. A dark period of time. In his world it is between 6:00 pm and 8:00 pm. He started the day at 8:00 am and went dark at 6:00 pm.

Jesus: Six to eight. Eight to six. 6 is the number of creation, 8 the number of death. Symmetry under a cemetery wall.

God [on the god mic]: Yes. So it was 10 hours from starting bang to dark period.

Jesus: The number of unity and perfection.

God: [on the god mic]: This is a one man show, kid. Yes, unity, perfection. There’s the 1, the source number which adds to itself and makes all the other numbers, and Queen Zero, the female number, and if I may speak phallically and yonically, just look at them together: 10. One goes through all the other numbers to join with 0 and she gives birth to the next set of ten.

Jesus: Ten hours of wandering to get to 6:00, and then two hours go by: the blank period of time. And then? And then?

God: [on the god mic] Don’t interrupt, we’re going here. Line?

Jesus: Onan.

God [on the god mic]: And then he pulls out. Like Onan. And is stranded for a time. For a time. Line?

Jesus: For a time starting at 8:00 pm.

God [on the god mic]: For a time starting at 8:00 and following a moving now through linear duration to an end point at line?

Jesus: 2:00 am

God [on the god mic]: 2:00 am. 6 hours. 6 is a revolving sphere so he goes from linearity to oblivion (wilderness) to circularity and then ends up in bed with eternity. Do people still care about circular numbers?

Jesus: Hell if I know.

God [on the god mic]: 6 squared is 36, 6 to the third power is 216, 6 to the 4th power is 1296, to the 5th power is 7776, to the 6th power is 46656 and so each and so on to no last term. The last digit of every one of them is 6.

Jesus: It circles back to itself.

God [on the god mic]: It circles back to itself. Mortals get that, right? This thing is getting too long.

Jesus: Yeah, we can leave that out. The six circles fit around one thing too. Anybody with seven maneuverable circles knows that one. Goes back to six is the number of creation too. That whole 6 days thing and on the seventh you rested.

God [on the god mic]: Yeah right. I wish I had that much time off! But there’s no rest for the wicked, eh boy.

Jesus: You said it. Should we take it from the top?

Musemathematics. And you think you’re listening to the etherial.

May 18th • Sirens

Be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it. 4:21 pm

Penseroso

Mathematics is not arithmetic. Is that what you thought? Oh my darling. Arithmetic is 2*2/2=1+1. That’s just juggling numbers. But please, my delightful, look around you. Go ahead. light on something. That is not a something, that is a collection of number in relationships, in patterns, whispering the universal language. Some people, eccentrics mostly bless their hearts, think God is an external force. Now I know my dear that you know better. God is universal harmony perceived through number. And if God is this universal harmony perceived through number, and play along, then time is the soul of God. But don’t listen to me, who am I? I am only God. Listen to this:

Hear that? Numbers. Music is the voice of mathematics. Go look in the mirror (haven’t we done this before?) and open your mouth wide. Look in there, all the way in. Two tiny silky chords, wonderful, more than all others: the human voice. Vibrate those little silky strings and out comes number. Double that number and there you are, one octave higher. Divide it in half, one octave lower. An octave is the sound of the number 2. Divide by 3 and you get the musical fifth, the fifth note on the scale. Bald deaf Pat brought quite flat pad ink. Quite. Octaves and fifths love to make love. Men and women, when left undisturbed, naturally sing a 5th apart. Harmonious. The number 4 = 2*2 = the second octave. The number 5 is the musical third (Pat. Glorious that symmetry under the cemetery wall). Bald Pat Quite: a chord. You want a little dissonance? Try the numbers 7, 11, and 13. Heavy mojo in those numbers. I don’t even want to tell you about the number 20. Want to get a little irrational? Play the strings. Guitar frets are placed according to the 12th root of 2. Oh the numbers. Durations of notes have ratios too. And now we get into geometry. Oh my beauteous ones. If I could only tell you. Or show you. Or sing you. Or touch you. Or taste you. If only. Then I will never leave you. And you will never leave me. We can entwine in mathematical harmonies and whisper eternality into each other’s vibrating tympanic membranes. You will weave patterns with your body and look in triangular mirrors. But then you will see God and leave me to suffer. Snivel. Big spanishy eyes goggling at nothing. Wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevyhair un comb:’d.

I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief.

April 17th • Scylla and Charybdis

God (I've begun to think) implants a promise in all that insubstantial architecture that makes light out of the impervious surface of glass, and makes the shadow out of dreams. God has created nights well-populated with dreams, crowded with mirror images, so that man may feel that he is nothing more than vain reflection. That's what frightens us. 2:52 pm

Eureka! Come in my darling, the water’s fine. The tub is small, but we’ll get comfortable. Watch that displacement! Oh well, what’s a little water on the floor. Is that your foot? Shove over baby, make some empty space. We must have space independent of things. Get that matter out of the void! Can we do that? Create from void? Creatio ex nihilo? The Greeks believed not. Most of their creations come from water, although Heraclitus prefered creation from fire. Imagine a tub of that! No, this is much nicer. And cosy too, eh baby? Come, let’s fingerponder the materia prima a little. Honey, you are filthy! Look at that sheen forming on the water. All those layers of belief you carry around. Here, have some soap, nice citronlemon. Get behind those ears. Wash every nook and cranny. Especially your cranny. Want me to get that for you? Not yet? Now, where does everything begin? Well of course, it begins with me. I am God. Yes. Yes. Wait, you don’t believe me? Well you should. And don’t worry, you can be God too. You are God, ok? God. Oh I see. You believe in a different God. Well you show me yours and I’ll show you mine. Go ahead. He’s a he. Ok. White guy. Yup. Seated, gotcha. A throne? A king of some kind? When was the last time you listened to a king? Ok, ok, it is your belief. Keep going, rinse it out of there. Facial hair. Old. A light. A heart. An eye in the sky. Well now, you’re just riffing. Tell me, have you ever seen God? Ok, I get it. Faith needs no proof; you do not need to see to believe. But what about unbelief? That is so much harder to accomplish, you know. What will it take for you to unbelieve? What do I have to do to wipe away that God stain marring your vision? You’re putting a sticky film on the surface of everything. Ick. Smells too. Wait, what did you say? What about my stains? My sheen on the water? Do I believe my own theory? No, of course not. I neither believe nor disbelieve. I need help too, a nice push one way or the other. Want to take care of it for me? Tell me, do you push both ways? Now relax a little baby, roll over and let me get to that cranny.

We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.

April 16th • Scylla and Charybdis

Look in the mirror. See that person there? You think that is just one person looking back? Look into those eyes looking into your eyes. Stare hard. Wait for the melting away of edges, loss of borders, wait for all to fade but eyes then BAM! that’s you. That’s who you are. And that feeling? Felt it, did you? You found another you in there. A you you don’t often see. More than one. Multiple, really, you are simultaneously you and you and also you sharing one body that is itself an illusion of singularity. You co-exist with yourself, and without full integration. I don’t mean public and private parts of yourself. Look in the mirror again. Or look into other eyes; use them as mirrors. Every one you see (I say one, but they are all multiplicities too) reflects back a version of yourself. All those strangers are familiar parts of yourself. And look at your beloved. Go ahead, look into those eyes until all else is gone. See that? That’s you, looking back. You are surrounded by yourself, isolated into a temporality of your own experience. And who are you? Go ahead tell me. Tell us all. We’ll only hear versions of you which reflect versions of ourselves. What does this mean? Well, you tell me. It is the self alone who can make meaning, and only for the self. And what might be insensible to me might be meaningful to you. Who are you? You are me. Who am I? I am you. Who am I? I am God. Who are you? Well. Well, well. You go look in your mirror honey.

A star, a daystar, a firedrake, rose at his birth.

April 13th • Scylla and Charybdis

O, there be players that I have seen play -- and heard others praise, and that highly -- not to speak it profanely, that neither having th' accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made man, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. 2:40 pm

[Scene: Empty theatre. The stage manager is sitting in the house seats next to the director, who is eating seeds from a broad silver and gilt bowl.]

God: List. You hear that? Must be seventy people out there. Jesus! Jesus Christ! Where the hell is he? [on the god mic] Jesus!

Jesus: [Materializes suddenly behind God, startling the director who flies up into the grid, landing on a downstage line set.] God damn it, it’s a mess out there. Actors are showing up before their check in times, and without their sides. We ran out of extras and I’m

God: Can’t you just make more?

Jesus: I’m not a miracle worker!

God: Well, how did you do that water into wine thing?

Jesus: Never mind that. What’s going on in here? Whose bright idea was it to hire a bird to be the director?

God: Oh please let’s not get into that. The whole Arian thing and the meetings in Nicaea and Constantinople, the Nestorian business. It’s in our contract. We’re stuck with him, and he likes to be a dove so what can we do? Anyway, I’m not entirely sure, but I think he’s ready to see the Bella Cohens. Anybody promising?

Jesus: Let’s see. A bunch of girls who had decent to middling parts in The Tempest, Pericles, Winter’s Tale.

God: Too young.

Jesus: Well, Cleopatra is out there.

God: Who?

Jesus: Fleshpot of Egypt. Also Cressida and Venus.

God: Venus might work, but she’s a big star. Can we afford her? And is she willing to do drag?

Jesus: Probably not. Will do nudity though, she’s naked now. And she’s not really a star. She’s flaming out. Also, we have a crowd of people out there claiming to be Shakespeare’s relations. Brothers, mother.

God: Mother? Mary Arden? Can she act? Would she be a good Bella?

[Bird droppings fall from above.]

God: Fine, we’ll tell Mary we’re going another way. Jesus, send in Venus. And warn her she might want to put some clothes on, the director is in a temper.