Maestro Artifoni calls it a sacrifice, but a choice? No. One of the possibilities possible: I might sing for my supper. I have that talent, that’s mine. But his advice came in late. My exile, my return, I was there, now I’m here. 3/4 at 160. His timing is off. But I am grateful to him, his handshake given to me, a touch that didn’t take, but it is in vain.
2:57 pm
Afterwit. I remember my dream. I dreamed somebody dreaming me and in that dream I flew. It was a wonder. I was a wonder. I flew through the augur’s templum passing from behind and curved to the right. An evil sign for business warned Michael Scotus, but for the bird? What of his business? I was an augur once. I looked to the temple of air and saw past the image of my mother’s face to read the inhuman clamour of the birds. Thirteen swallows. If Judus go forth tonight, he will find reason to betray. He will go forth and meet himself. Why? I looked for reason to leave and found symbols both of departure and of loneliness. It was both. Nother dying come home Father. Now what? No birds. I was the bird. Bearing the name of a hawklike man I flew through space to come to time. Remember. I am almosting it. A man, an offer of melon, a creamfruit smell, and a future. Who? You will see who. The present must become the past so we may see the future.
2:50 pm
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.
2:46 pm
A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella, and in my case the reality of my existence has become reason for footnotes here or there. And that’s it. A theory published in a lesser journal then even more delicious, a theory refuted in a much more promising journal. Where am I going with this? I forget. Oh, I hate it when. Completely gone from my head. Wait. Let me walk back to where I was when. Positional memory, you understand, it will come back. Can’t walk away though, busy borrowing a pair of typing hands. I’ll wander with my mind. Are those your shoes? You walk around in those things? Deplorable. At least clean them up or something. Rub the dirt off. Here give them to me. I’m a shoemaker; I’ll fix them up for you. Oh I forgot. I’m here, you’re there. Well, do it yourself then. Oh yes! That’s right. I existed. I exist. I’ll keep existing if you’ll invoke me, but unfortunately I was the first of five surviving brothers and stories work so much better with three, so a couple of us had to go. Banishment from heart and home. And memory. Most people even deny I was a relative! As if there could just happen to be two unrelated John Shakespeares in Stratford. So, exiled I went to the land of lost umbrellas. People prefer to think of brothers in threes, you see that don’t you. We crave things in threes. Three is the magic number, yes it is, it’s the magic number. No more, no less. In comedy, three beats to a laugh. In fairy tales, two bad examples then one good. One two three, two two three, three two three five. I was the first of five brothers, named for our father. Then, forgetting our sisters if you’ll allow it, came my famous brother you know the one. The others, Gilbert, Richard, and Edmund, were a haberdasher, a dimwit, and an actor, respectively. Edmund, following Will’s footsteps, treaded the boards in my shoes. But it was Will’s boots that changed the shape of Edmund’s feet. Until he died too early, that is, carried out of the theatre feet first and put into the ground with a forenoon knell of the great bell. We all felt the loss, though Will paid the bill. Maybe he felt that inner gnawing bite of conscience. William, the false, usurping, adulterous brother. I was the eldest. And I sold my birthright for so little. But I did have what I had. And I still have, thanks to eternity. Whatever anywhere wherever was, is and is and is three and five times over and then some. What else is there to want? We all want what we already have.
2:16 pm
Scene: [Around the ideal form of a table sit Cassandra, Caesar, Thoth, Lizzie Twigg, Brunetto Latini, Mother Dana, and Little John. The theatre is darkened and an appropriate number of candles are burning with an inward light alongside several vestals’ lamps. Peatsmoke rises from the trapdoor along with wafts of incense made from opoponax and violets. Rest suddenly possesses the discrete vaulted cell, rest of warm and brooding air.]
Lizzie Twigg: Right. Thank you all for coming.
Little John: [Drunk, a little dumb] When are we getting paid?
Cassandra: Why is he here? His breath is harming the vibrations. And are those birthday candles?
Lizzie Twigg: Yes, they seemed appropriate. Don’t mind Little John, I found him vomiting in the greenroom and we needed one more body. Seven is the perfect number for a séance and I am determined to get it right this time. So let’s get started. Æ is loose among the living, he’s only just managed to go undetected, though just barely. So far he has appeared in Scylla and Charybdis, but there is no telling where he’ll turn up next so we have to get him back. Thoth, am I speaking too quickly?
Thoth: No, I’m recording it all perfectly, thanks. Learned from Chitragupta.
Cassandra: We won’t get him back.
Lizzie Twigg: He’s coming back. Now, be prepared for paradoxes. He is alive but he is also dead. His body has regenerated and though he appears normal, he is greatly decayed. But from looking he is what he was; his moles still appear in their usual places, but he is a bit soft. Also, his molecules are shuttling to and fro much too rapidly. Mother Dana, we will need your help to repair him when we get him back.
Cassandra: We won’t get him back.
Caesar: You said that already.
Mother Dana: I can weave and unweave bodies and reconcile him to himself, but I’m not sure what to do about sharpening him up.
Lizzie Twigg: Well, we’ll cross that Rubicon when we come to it. First, there can be no reconciliation if there has not been a sundering. Should be simple after that.
Caesar: [Simply] You think it’s so easy.
Cassandra: [Easily] Down, boy. Life was hard for us all. No need to get worked up about it now you’re dead.
Caesar: [Deadly] Vixen. Whore. Who listens to you? Your kind sickens me.
Little John: [vomits under the table] Shagart! Shagart!
Lizzie Twigg: Bear with me people. When Æ resurrected he took my heart with him.
Thoth: What did it weigh?
Lizzie Twigg: And I want him back. Besides, I may see myself as I sit here now, but by reflection from that which then I shall be. And that future which casts its shadow before includes Æ.
Cassandra: But this is eternity, honey, there is no future. The future is the conjoined twin sister of the past. That which was, is. That which may come to be, is. It’s an all-at-onceness, sweet girl, nothing more.
Lizzie Twigg: Exactly. And he’s not here. My is, is missing an aeon.
Cassandra: I warn you, Lizzie, bring him back and he will crave the world of the living. But you won’t bring him back.
Brunetto Latini: Dear Twigg, when he returns you must reassure him that he will live on in his work. Glory gives the wise man a second life; that is to say, after his death the reputation which remains of his good work makes it seem as if he were still alive.
Cassandra: It won’t be enough.
Lizzie Twigg: [Tossing off a glass of brandy neat] Please, let’s get started. Where there is reconciliation, there must have been first a sundering.
Caesar: You said that already.
2:06 pm
Forming. Forming. And I thought the afterlife was for fulfilling. Try resurrection some time! I died. I came back. Who does that? I must be, yes, I am a God. Yes. Yes. Feel it. I was the formless spiritual and now I am the Allfather, Adam Kadmon, the heavenly man. Jesus Christ I’m a magician now, the magician of the beautiful! Oh yes, I am back. I was never an ordinary person. I lived the life esoteric, and look at me now! Get a glimpse of my elemental! Not so blurry today. This is the virgin birth, right here. In this space. At this time. Soul reinserted into body. I am God!
Krishna: Stop!
Wait, what just happened. Who are you? Why did everything just freeze in place? Why are you blue?
Krishna: I have stopped time. Listen to me, I will tell you the secret of life.
I already know the secret of life. I am the secret of life! Look at me. I’m back, baby. I’m here. I’m in a library talking Hamlet with a kid and an old new critic. And I am the only one here who knows the truth of the afterlife that the kid dances around.
Krishna: Those who are without faith in my teaching cannot attain me; they endlessly return to this world shuttling from death to death.
Ah, but that’s where you are wrong blue man, I haven’t been reincarnated. This is not your ordinary metempsychosis. You are looking at resurrection! This is altogether a different kettle of fish.
The Ondt: [Clipping the end of a cigar. Havana. A fine Romeo y Julieta] You smell like a kettle of fish, Æ, your Auric egg’s gone bad.
Krishna: That rotten egg smell is your sulfuric breath, Ondt. What are you doing here? How did you get into this moment? I stopped time, this is our now. Out, Ondt!
The Ondt: [making faces at himself in the window] Honey, this is my space. I can crawl into your now through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood and back out through Blake’s buttocks into eternity if I like. You hold to the now all you like, but it is the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
Krishna: Fine. Æ, we shall proceed regardless. You have not become deathless; you have merely become manifest without a rebirth. You are most certainly not God or even a god. I am God! I am known by everyone as the many, the One; behind the faces of a million gods, they can see my face. I am the ritual and the worship, the medicine and the mantra, the butter burnt in the fire, and I am the flames that consume it.
The Ondt: [Taking the form of the Lord of Loaves] Got a light? And hey, don’t burn up all that butter.
You both need to cool it. Look, I used to think that the world’s revolutions were born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on a hillside, from the people for whom the earth is a living mother. But I don’t think so anymore. The world’s revolutions are born from those of us who say this verily is that. I took my own fate by the balls. The point is I am the point. I have free will! I used to think that God is a stage manager in the theatre of the eternal, but I am beyond that now. I am God if I say I am God. What of it? You can be God too if you like. And look there, you see that person breathing all over us? That one who clicks instead of talks? And stares and stares, eyeballs moving here and now here and then over to here. There is God. God is a click in the street.
The Ondt: [Blowing smoke rings] The peatsmoke is going to his head.
Krishna: [Crossing his arms defensively. He is caught between the devil and the ocean of Theosophy] I know all beings who have passed, and all who live now, Æ, and all who are yet to be. In the face of the one who can see all temporalities, how can you be so distressingly shortsighted? How can you believe your will is free?
You guys can blow smoke up my ass all day if you like, I don’t care. I know what I know. Talk until you are blue in the face. I’m making plans.
1:36 pm
The moon and the sun are the same size. Apparent size, but what else is there for us on the ground? They are both 110 times their diameters away from us. Why the same? Now that’s really a coincidence. Maybe it has something to do with parallax?
Measure your diameter. Then multiply by 110. Now, stand that far away from Molly. Go ahead, you’ll be in good company. That’s where I am, apparently. Welcome to my world. She said she could never like it again after Rudy died. Something changed. She held up her finger. Hold up your finger and measure your finger tip. Multiply by 110 — that’s about your arm’s length, a coincidence? Stretch out your arm with your finger erect and blot out the sun. Go ahead, give it the finger! Feel that power. Sexual. Yes. Yes. Ah. Well.
It was a full moon that night walking with Molly, he on the other side of her. The daughter of the moon and she’s beaming. He’s blazing. Their fingers touch palms. Ask with finger in palm, a little tickle. Touch me. Answer back. Yes. Eclipse me baby. Stop. Stop. If it was it was. Is, is. Done. Stop. Something else.
Would I go back to times before fingers and touches and apparent distances? Can’t bring back time. Can’t bring back anything. Like holding water in your hand. I am the water. Time is not a thing, it is an experience and even a feature of me. And I was happier then. I was. Was that I? Am I now I? If it is true that I am someone, and that I was also someone, are we (this I, that I) the same I? If we were all suddenly somebody else. I was happier then. Absolutely. There is no absolute. And I. I am not I. I am a multiple divided creature. I am we. We are legion. Enough. The machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of men.
1:33 pm
[Scene: Around the ideal form of a table sit Æ., Lizzie Twigg, the Reverend Dr. Salmon, Cassandra, and a Wizard. The stage is darkly lit and the theatre is neither over heated nor chilly but at a comfortable temperature as typically a séance releases an unusual amount of magnetism, thus the room generally becomes warmer than ordinary. The shades of the living like good ventilation too, so keep that in mind. On a side table a buffet brunch waits congealing for any hungry living soul which may come. Today’s menu includes nut steak, weggebobbles cooked in soda, fruit, two headed octopus, eyes of cow, and poached eyes on ghost.]
Æ: Those cow eyes are following me everywhere I go. Right. Let’s get started, shall we. Five of us today, not an ideal number. I would have prefered seven or something occult like 13, more symbolic.
Rev. Dr. Salmon: Take yourself in hand, Æ, you can’t have everything. Am I right Miss Twigg?
Lizzie Twigg: Not saying a word. Just taking it all in.
Cassandra: It is easier with one medium but we appear to have two. Well, as long as he remembers who is running the show, we can’t have the energies dividing. Now, the purpose of today’s séance is to attract a living spirit Æ might possess long enough for his astral body to re-enter the physical world.
Wizard: Metempsychosis?
Æ: No, resurrection. I’ll be needing my body which I understand will regenerate around me.
Rev. Dr. Salmon: Hold on a minute. That body was tinned long ago, you’ll smell like a bad egg, you can’t put an egg back into the shell, the genie is not going to fit back into the bottle, once you get it out it’s hard to get it back in.
Cassandra: Please, too many images scrambled. Let’s keep clear, yes?
Æ: My vegetative body will be attracted by my active astral body and through the vibration of molecules the phenomena of density and apparent weight will collect particles together along with an unseen mass of electrical and magnetic matter, and from that my physical body will form within the living world. Easy. Scientific.
Lizzie Twigg: I answered the wrong ad. I could have picked the other gentleman who wanted aid in literary work. Or even the riding companion one. That sounds pretty good now. I could use a good belt of booze.
Æ: Shall we venture now into the untrodden woods to carve the future ways?
Wizard: Æ, Æ beware of the day! For dark and despairing, my sight I may seal, but man cannot cover what God would reveal: ‘Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore, and coming events cast their shadow before.
Lizzie Twigg: [Agitated, her stockings loose over her ankles. I detest that. Tasteless.] Yes! Remember, time put by a myriad fates that her day might dawn in glory; death made wide a million gates so to close her tragic story. I took it all in. Didn’t you pay attention to your own words? Why go back? Here, there, eternity, temporality. What difference does it make to us? We have left the day to day.
Rev. Dr. Salmon: I say, it is feeling quite close in here.
Æ: We are doing this. I want to do this. I’ll get a different séance circle, but I am going back.
Lizzie Twigg: This isn’t what you thought it would be, is it Æ? There is nothing dreamy here, or cloudy, or symbolistic. You wanted the light of lights. You still do. You miss wanting what you didn’t get. So you retreat back into wanting. You want to be the head upon which the ends of the world have forgotten to come.
Cassandra: Please, you are disturbing the vibrations. Let us join hands and begin.
Lizzie Twigg: Fine. But why anybody would want to entrap themselves into the present moment amongst the unenlightened. This will never work.
Cassandra: Believe me, we will channel the living and Æ will go back.
Wizard: Down, soothless insulter! I trust not the tale.
Cassandra: Please. You don’t believe me? Tell me something I haven’t heard before. Ok. Moving on. We call on the living spirit of the one who has been hovering near. I feel you. I know you are here. Make a sign to us. One click for yes and two clicks for no.
Æ: Anything?
Cassandra: I heard something but it was more a mouse than a click.
Wizard: The war drum is muffled.
Cassandra: I call upon you, you know who you are, to draw near. Lean in honey, we can hear you breathing.
Lizzie Twigg: Look at Æ!
Wizard: Oh! mercy dispel yon sight, that it freezes my spirit to tell! Life flutters convulsed in his quivering limbs, and his blood-streaming nostril in agony swims.
Cassandra: Oh holy Zeus I didn’t believe myself this time but look! Æ? Can you hear us Æ?
Æ: Click.
Lizzie Twigg: Where did he go? Oh Jesus Fucking Christ, I swear to stage manager, nothing good can come from this.
God: [from the booth on the god mic] Ok hold. Jesus, what in my name is going on down there? Where is Æ?
Jesus: I’m not sure. He’s gone. I think they resurrected him.
God: He can’t be resurrected. This is supposed to be a dress rehearsal, and people please stay on script and stick to the blocking. The light cues were a mess toward the end of that. Jesus, get Æ back and let’s go again from the top.
Jesus: I can’t get him back, he’s been resurrected. Like Lazarus, remember?
God: [On the god mic] How can I forget that debacle? Can still smell his stench.
Rev. Dr. Salmon: How was I? I felt a little off.
Cassandra: You were very convincing, believe me.
Rev. Dr. Salmon: I didn’t get to say my speech. The dreamy cloudy gull, waves o’er the waters dull.
Jesus: Um, God? Now that Æ is loose in the world, well, that’s going to throw a wrench into Scylla and Charybdis.
God: [on the god mic] Not our problem. Jesus Christ where’s the holy spirit? Why we are going with a director we can’t keep track of, only I know. Well, we don’t have time for this. Let’s recast Æ and move on. Is Arius busy? Did he get over his, well, issue? Maybe call his agent. Let it be done. Don’t forget we have casting for Circe coming up and tech for that will be a nightmare.
1:30 pm
We die. Mors Certa, Hora Incerta. So how can we be anything? No-one is anything. From the void and to the void, and again and again. Things go on the same. One born every minute. Well more like, let’s see, carry the one. Stop a minute so I can calculate this. Women all over in their life throws. Sss. Dth, dth, dth! They won’t stop so I can count. There’s more born, washing the blood off. All are washed in the blood of the lamb. Not stillborn of course. They are not even registered. Trouble for nothing. Well, I am almosting it. So. So. So far this year there have been 30,275,000 births rounding up. 84 days so far this year. 360,417 births a day, rounding up. That’s 15,018 births an hour. 251 births a minute. Wait a second. That’s, yes, 5 births a second. No point rounding down. How long did it take your eye to move from we die to 5 births a second? Cities of people coming and coming. Lives and lives. Passing away too. In your life were you the Gracehoper or the Ondt? Doesn’t matter, back to the void with you! How many? How many. Wish I had paper. Um. 12,930,000 deaths this year, might as well round up. People die and we don’t even know. Months later somebody smells something. A drip through the ceiling from the tenant above. 153,929 deaths a day. That’s 6,414 people every hour. 107 a minute and every second 2 people die. 1.78 really. One dies and one gets 78% of the way there. Mostly dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. Give it a second. You can’t be mostly dead all day. There you go. Welcome to the void. You have been unmade. It will be the making of you. You were a being. You filled space. Now you are a becoming. Not changing, no, I mean fulfilling. You took a form intended for you all along. That is, your form is gone. Your form is formlessness. I know, death is new to you. You’ll get there. Destruction and creation are simultaneous. Death and rebirth are the same thing spelled different ways. You hungry? Of course not, what am I saying. Sorry. It’s this time of day. This is the very worst hour of the day. Vitality. Dull, gloomy: hate this hour. Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed. Intended. Caught that did you? Well. Well, well.
1:23
Time means nothing. Nothing at all. Eighty seven hours so far? Is that what they said talking about me like I’m not here in this body. It’s the body and the baby they focus on. I’m in here if you want to know is she Latina ask me bitches I’m right here! Talking behind my head here comes one. Pain it comes from far away, a distance away. From some other place then it is here now ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Remembered not to hold my breath that time. Make the noise. Helps, not sure how. Sacred ohm sounding, but doula didn’t get it when I told her. Minute and a half? Means nothing. Time stretches and contracts like me stretches contracts dilates, not like me. Never felt it like this before. Feel it undulating with me during, when. Pushing through me like a wave in a tube. How many centimeters. Just a bit left they said. Stuck. Watching me watching them sharpening the knives. Give her one more hour then cut her open, get it done. Walk more. Rock. Birth ball. Dance shuffle side to side. Again same hallway again. Walk. Come on. Anesthesiologist checking in. Standing by. Wants to go to lunch probably. Plotting. Here comes one, distant traveler, coming closer, time unduuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuulaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaatiooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooon aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuum.
Oh. Never ends. I live here now. The after, it went more quickly than they say. I am fine between. Ready. Should have ignored midwife. Get in the bath she said, slow it down so you can rest. Rest my ass. Pretending to sleep so he could sleep. I need him later. Rest, you’ll never rest again. Pain worse lying down. Pacing in patterns. I don’t remember the first day much. Now. All that is. Everything and nothing. Time shortened and lengthened together. When the pain comes time comes with it, squeezing. A peristaltic now. They told me not to eat. Don’t vomit when we slice into you. Sneaking food. Can’t do it for this long just on fumes. Inhumane. Do they remember my humanity. I am a human body and no more. I was in here too. Before. Then there’s that one at her computer. Recording angel obstetric nurse who never had a baby. The miracle of life, the beauty of birth, shut the fuck up. Coming now. She’ll see it on her monitor. Hasn’t looked at me in hours. Like a visit from purity of and God and pain and pain. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
Oh Christ I am running out of time. I need help. help me. help me. Grandma come. I need you. Show up. Everybody out grandma come. Hello. Hand on my face. smile. She looks. And then she is with. Mamama. Mamama here. Hello. Hello. Help me Mamama. She stands aside and a veiled woman. Older. Mamama touches my hair, holding me calm. The veiled woman her hands inside me swirling in patterns, pushing, moving, gentle. What. They look at each other. Nod. Mamama. Oh she is holding me I’m in her arms so little and she loves me. She loves me. I was special to her. I didn’t know. I didn’t know her. She loves me. Look she says with her eyes. Look and I’m holding him, my beauty love. I’m holding him. She’s gone so fast and he’ll be here now. He’s coming now. She has me, we’ll be ok. Thank you. Thank you.
uuugh uuugh uuugh uuugh uuugh uuugh