ekleksographia

1.The Pocked Infant

A text is a doorway downward
This is fearful material
All thoughts of all times live in the labyrinth
All minds live under the ground
Return to the diamond, for a moment
God head blending is on a molecular level
Be God and you can know
a fraction disastrously small
The underground is perfect freedom and perfect uncertainty
The towers are titanic dead bones each housing a single caretaker
nothing but the landscape of knives
(the wind desperate and wild from the intrusions in the sky)
every alteration is permissible
Bridge construction would begin to form an elevated crust over the world
In the end you’d see an expanded world, a forest labyrinth masked beneath a canopy of doors
The strange patterns formed from this collapse cool and wait; the first subterranean explorers appear
Excavations continue toward the heart of the planet
it is now a pocked sphere
it is an orb of entrances that has expanded and eaten its sun

All thoughts of all times live in the labyrinth. A text is a doorway downward; these doorways surround the earth.  They open into a god’s belly: tunnels that worm toward the world’s core, trenching from the domed walls of the sub-terrain.  All uncovered knowledge is moving in the halls, and in the infinite remaining room runs darkness that is not darkness, but the rest of knowledge poised to turn and be discovered. This is fearful material: bump into it in the black and it cuts you down to youthful fear, when a darkened room could scare you through the power of a story you should not have heard yet.   

In the underground, the known population is made of the thoughts of every life on earth back to the beginning of thought.  This is because a mind is built of other minds.  Like Barthes’ word stands atop other words that it is not, a man cannot be fully defined but by surroundings; entities near, and not him. 

Look to a stone.  For it to be a particular one, a positive, an actual is, it must not be anything but itself.  It cannot be the negatives that surround it, not the lake overhead or the mud beneath, and not the fish above and around it, nor the weeds that ring to make it the floor of a waving well, not if it is to be itself.  Surrounded by negatives, the is-nots, it is absolutely what it is.  The walls of water, the mud, fish and weeds weave an envelope in space the stone needs in order to be where it is and what it is.  If all these neighbors did not constantly crowd, it would vanish.  Our stone at the bottom of the lake is touched by association by every object in the universe, visible and invisible, and so our stone, by that pressure, is forced to be itself; it must be.  If all the crushing is-nots fell out of existence, our stone would follow in the blinking of an eye.  And were the stone itself and only it to disappear, the full universe would learn very soon to dread that place, for all stars and planets would go to congregate there and pull as a rope through the hole into oblivion. 

            All thoughts of all times live in the labyrinth.  Consider again the upper landscape of doors – a grouping far tighter than the pores in the skin, and so the countryside does not look like sweeping plains marked by occasional earth-ward portals; the ground is nothing but doors, a shell around the earth.  Now the picture is not so simple as every doorway the representation of a book.  A book is an arrangement of language, of ideas, each piece (many distinguishable, many not) a different face on a diamond possessed of an infinity of faces.  That arrangement is only what it is by all those others it is not, and so again, to be itself, it must be nothing else, and since all else surrounds to define it, when you pick up that one thing that it is, you are necessarily lifting the infinite.  All minds through literature live under the ground; all communicate there.  A new arrangement goes into a mind and makes it able, with greater ease, to enter the underworld.  For every book, tens of thousands of doors appear instantly, and as the arrangement of words sinks deep enough to begin to coax open newer thought lines, the number of doors increases.  But for there to be an ever-swelling number, either doors would need to stack – doors on doors (so to go through one is to pass ten thousand), or the shell would have to expand, enlarging the circumference of the earth forever and fast, making the labyrinth identical to the universe in its potential for size, and therefore also identical in that it could never be fully explored.

Return to the diamond, for a moment.  This, the old-moon question: do the rocks themselves shine?  Say they do; a curious luminescence inside the diamond sheds out stalks of light only obviously separable light-years away. The core of light, it is Helnwein’s face of God, but most accurately a webbing of information so tight our greatest modern machines cannot be sharpened enough to make readings minute enough to find the seams, but even more difficult than this: in fact there are no divides as we know divides.  God head blending is on a molecular level.  You have to know the characteristics of each column of light so well that separation is a game of selecting particles one by one, and many in a single beam are identical to those in others – this means you’re going to have to know the number of particles in a beam, changing moment by moment.  Be God and you can know.  As the deep of water calls to deep, so light to light.  The population of columns within the cosmic diamond is a serpent’s stomach full with young, but take out that crop, stretch it and find tiny thimble-heads open on narrow tails and tails.  Or give answer to the old-moon question this way: the rocks do not glow.  It is light from outside.  From where?  What is beyond the diamond’s walls?  What out there can make God in this hard planet?   

            No one knows every negative, so none can know any one positive truly.  People see fractions of the negatives engulfing each positive (of course a positive is also a negative to some other positive; thus all positives are negatives and all negatives are positives), a fraction disastrously small.  Nothing can be known down to the irrefutable and unchangeable.  But also there is nothing that cannot be considered.  The underground is perfect freedom and perfect uncertainty. 

Take Stapledon’s last race of man and his magic book.  Deity level technological abominations allow the author to crown the shoulder of the reader in the form of recorded telepathy.  Over the shoulder he supplies the infinite negatives by which the single positive can be known for certain.  There is no room to wander, no labyrinth or planetary shell of doors.  Each work instead of transporting readers into eternity, builds on the landscape a high tower in height a little like the pylon mega-buildings of this final race, but ours don’t take years to grow; they’re complete the instant the author allows his work to reach the public mind.  A book is published; a tower sprouts in a terrifying flash; a pinnacle miles high. 

The towers are titanic dead bones each housing a single caretaker.  These vast and prettily ornamented horns are prisons.  No Pangea of doors in this world; nothing but the landscape of knives.  Visitors must hold out their hands to a grinding wheel at the door to have their nails filed back; there will be no visitors’ scratches on any interior corridor.  And every external architectural feature is built to withstand all change; an eon of wind cannot sand them softer (the towers do not groan in the wind), and the entire life of the nearest sun cannot touch their color (forever they’re a winter forest, white as bone). 

In one of these towers an image reminds a guest of a foreign set of knowledge, and he begins to talk to himself about this in relation to what he sees (he has in mind that this comparison, his addition to the base idea, would improve the hallway were it left there for others to see; spread a carpet on the floor; hang a painting on the wall; mortar tile down).  He would like to do this, but the author is there.  His speech does not stop.  “What you see is already all it can be and thus will be forever.”  It doesn’t matter if our visitor tries anyway.  The moment the new idea leaves his hand, the author, standing behind him, will pluck it and swallow it down.  The only end solution for the idea man is a long walk away; he must climb down from the tower, miles down to the ground and once there, must begin a tower of his own, one which will include the exact hallway he encountered miles up; but this second one will be decorated by tile.  Cruelly forced into his master project because of frustrated thought miles in the air, the new builder will not allow any softness in the walls of his own work so as to make possible its manipulation by the hands of his guests.  No; he will build his catacombs and rooms and spires with the same stubborn stone as that used for the tower he hated.  He, like the first builder, will follow every guest, lighting their way with a spotlight in each hand, so every feature is viewed in light he controls; he will seal the corridors harder every moment with the fog of his own voice, and with that too, seal the mouths of his flock.  The voice and the light will fill the second tower just as the first is filled, will perform the same second function: it will act as the inside pressure of the tower, keeping the outer wind (the wind desperate and wild from the intrusions in the sky) from crushing the structure like a cone of paper.  The psychic landscape of this world is a spreading forest of miles tall towers, each containing its own peculiar and eternal twist of information.  This forest is thick.  The growths stand side by side in great patches.  Never does a tower sprout in the barren plains, for thought breeds thought.  The man who wanted tiles in the hall, who was forced down, builds his tower directly beside the one he fled.  And beside his, another will grow, and beside that one, another.  The planet becomes a mace, a water mine with an overpopulation of triggers, or better, a cosmic sea-urchin; the spines could be flares of a living sun, but it’s a frozen star.  Now it might sound as though this growth were really the same as the labyrinth, with tunnels on top of the ground instead of below.  But the difference is, in the labyrinth, the tunnels connect, and every alteration is permissible.  Names are carved deep in walls.  The inhabitants kick out doorways where there are none; trap doors in floors; drum attic hatches in ceilings.  All is banked by tile, hung with art, draped in carpet.  But carpets can also be burned and are, and paintings are peeled apart and run through; that tile is often jack hammered away to widen passages, dilate them into highways.  But couldn’t a person move from tower to tower, hopping from one open doorway over sickening heights into the open doorway of the next tower standing only a few yards away?  Better, why not build covered bridges between these doorways (covered, of course, to keep out the violent wind)?  Bridge construction would begin to form an elevated crust over the world so extensive that soon no more sun shafts could reach the ground far below, and the bridge-roof-shell would require doorways to give entrance to those in the new upper homes.  In the end you’d see an expanded world, a forest labyrinth masked beneath a canopy of doors.  But no.  This is impossible in the world where meaning is fixed.  The towers absolutely do not have doors in their outer walls (save the entrance, and this is open only long enough for the old guest to leave and the next guest to enter; yes, only one visit at a time), and so no bridges will be built.  And there are no windows in the walls.  Just as in our old cathedrals, before buttress arms sprouted and arches raised domes that together made possible leaner walls and therefore more expansive windows, the walls of the towers allow no openings.  There cannot be even a pin hole to let in light because then that light by the movement of the sun may reflect every dawn in some unintended way off an edge of wall; that shaft is a poison growing that in its unending daily return, would scare the author out of his own halls, spook him outside.  And then the end would come.  Watch it happen though it never will.

Say a fissure forms and from it enters a hair’s breadth of light.  The author leaves. His inside-outward pressure no longer flexes against the wind, and so his work crumples, squeezed into a nimble blade ten times tall as the tower, a blade that under its own horrific weight slips through the ground, plunges deep, all its miles sinking, sending splinters of itself crashing into caverns in the dark.  The strange patterns formed from this collapse cool and wait; the first subterranean explorers appear.  In those ragged halls they make anything they like out of the odd pieces lying around.  They find stairwells leading to nothing, walls cut by walls, hallways that stretch for ages and then stop at rock.  That’s where they dig.  Some authors see the hole in the ground; others only hear of a thrilling chaos down in the underworld; a few open their doors and go for a look. 

Towers and towers fall.  The urchin is now an urchin bone but much more is a baby’s skull in its mobility.  Excavations continue toward the heart of the planet; it is now a pocked sphere; it is an orb of entrances that has expanded and eaten its sun.

 

2.To The Big Big Shepherds 

say it takes all of earth to make him a writer
It must be read or it is locked
Dead child; almighty non-musical
All that’s required is a quick seduction of some past mother
a quick flip of a stroller-carriage over into a ravine one can count on
information rearranged by the creativity of the author, made to pass through a shape he thought beautiful
The world is still the world
infinite
a little restricting, as analogies hate to be but always are
a gelatinous cloud of frog eggs
an eternal mass of globes of interacting information
But if you like better for time to behave like a librarian’s stamp
noticeable only by the most severe of the experts
(you can never be too careful)
forming beautiful displacements of the eternal
don’t strike up a  conversation            

 

See two pyramids meeting at their business ends, or two clouds.  This is not a math problem, but only shapes used to help me see what the job of the writer is and what the job of the critic is.  What an author does, and all an author does, is organize, displace (not change) preexisting information into an environment called a book or short story, a poem or critique.  This location is confining in two different ways.  Though first, how can we say that information, being infinite, is confined when organized, when formed into literature, for if Barthes is right and “The book is a world,” what can contain a world?  An author operates within all the information of earth, which is to say it takes all of earth to make him a writer, just as it takes all of it to make anyone a real person, and so the earth entire does go into the writer’s work, yet even still, confinement is possible.  The first thing that makes a particular ordering of information confined is the easy fact that you have to encounter it to experience the new order.  It must be read or it is locked.  Before a work is treated with a reading, it amounts to an enormity of information colliding into an absolutely silent space, that of the closed work communing with the author’s head.  It is not until it is opened and the information processed, that it is shown to be exactly what it always was even though now displaced, and that is, infinite.  The second way literature contains all of the world, or all information, is that it causes this all to pass through a certain shape that holds it, not still, but does hold, perhaps as a cigarette holds smoke and air, not still, yet confined.  But don’t be thrown by the cigarette.  It would be better to think of all information being held by, being made to enter the iris of, a stainless-steel snowflake, something that narrow – and look, it’s also beautiful.  Is the job of the critic to take the organizing work by which the author displaces the world’s information and unmake it, putting all the pieces back into their places? (though, where are the places of information?)  Well, if it cannot be placed back, maybe it can be taken off the author’s hands, his work of confinement broken.  Here’s to clarify the cigarette, the snowflake: imagine a guitar neck a mile wide with strings to fill it; this is all of the world’s information.  The author places a small wedding band around all cords, whether aware of this or not, forcing them to a unique place of meeting.  Is the critic’s job to break the band, to loose the cords to fly back to their distant origins, one large note struck by the release of so many strands of information?  No, this is not the right job.  The sound would be all strings at once, a horrid-ugly orchestral hit; no, better, all piano keys slammed at once by a child striking all with horizontal body slam from a high dive platform.  Dead child; almighty non-musical.  For the critic to dissolve the band would be for the critic to kill the author.  I mean literally kill him, to insure that another rearrangement never comes to be.  The closest a critic can legally get to this is to romp so viciously on an author’s vulnerabilities that another work is emotionally impossible.  The world’s infinite information would never again be shackled to a single place, or rather, through a location, by that one person.  Or, better than this, if the business of critics is the literal unmaking of authors, then a step back in time would be the most handy trip ever taken.  All that’s required is a quick seduction of some past mother or father before their mothering and fathering can get going, or easier and timelier, a quick flip of a stroller-carriage over into a ravine one can count on. There’s one wedding band that will never do anything to the cords of information.  But this is a seducer-slash-assassin’s job, not a critic’s.  Again imagine the strings funneled through the author’s shackling device, the novel, short story, poem, critique.  I mentioned two pyramids, and by them I mean two shapes.  The first belongs to the author.  Remember, I am not saying he changes the information by handling it.  He only displaces it.  This displacement is the only important thing to him whether he accepts it or not.  So we have all the cords of information pinched down to a point.  From this point, and in a pyramid shape expanding at the exact same angles (though now outward) the cords took while being reigned in, they are let loose to expand, and they do so to the same distances as can be found a million miles back from the author’s device of meeting.  But if the information is the same on the one side of the band as it is on the other, then what are we even talking about?  The band is unnecessary.  A lifetime after the work, the cords are capable of the exact same multiplicity of actions as they were a lifetime before the work, aren’t they?  Yes they are, but remember, with the band now they have been bent.  The information is the same, true, but it is not in the same place.  Had the author never written, the information would be the same, not dislocated by him, and this is to say, it would be itself, infinite, just as hardly known.  The difference with the band is this: the new ordering, that is, the confinement, or better, the shape of the launch pad off of which all information now springs, not only influences the information that flies forward, but alters all past information, for it is now seen by the light of the new, which is information rearranged by the creativity of the author, made to pass through a shape he thought beautiful.  The job of the critic is to discover how the worlds’ information, displaced, travels now.  That new kind of travel can be called the author’s style and nothing more.  The world is still the world; but it has been expressed in a new way which again shows it to be what it is, and that is: infinite.  Remember, this band which the author builds is not a funnel; it may cause a funnel shape in your imagination if the shape of a funnel helps you think of the bending of the cords.  But he does not control the information for one instant beyond or before the moment that it gets to another’s eyes.  When a reader encounters a work, this is the grouping of moments in which that work reveals itself to be infinite and the writer’s job is shown to him to be limited so much more so than he thought, though it is not an unbeautiful job because of this.  The picture of the guitar strings might be a little restricting, as analogies hate to be but always are, so it may help to change the strings into a gelatinous cloud of frog eggs, an eternal mass of globes of interacting information.  Now if you like the idea of time to be a work of the hero named Present Time, nosing his way forward into nothingness and leaving a wake of creation in his foot falls, then see the cosmic mass of greenish eggs and greenish cloud flowing forward, pressing its face to the back of Present Time as he moves.  The author tosses up his ring into the microscopic space between the family of globes and Present Time’s spine; as a result, the mass bulks but then leaps through the ring and swells again and again noses up to Present Time.  But the shape of the mass is different now.  It, compressed in an odd way to it, will never again be what it was, not in make up, but in position, and by taking a new position, it will not be able to help but show different sides of itself from now on, sides always in existence, just unseen.  The work of the author is to force information to shift.  The work of the critic is to study that shift and find information yet again to be infinite after the compression, but also to find through it new truths, new to him and everyone, but of course not new to what is.  What is can never be more and never be less.  But if you like better for time to behave like a librarian’s stamp, the chilly toes of time on to the chilly extended fingertips of it already stretched out in one big hammer stomp on which we are beings so minute that our vision sees only a deteriorating past and a blind future which feels so much like invention that we don’t call it blindness, then look at it this way.  The great frog egg mass of information extends infinitely forward and infinitely back.  The author in his blind present is lined up along the exact same somewhere in the cloud as the rest of us; he practices his work by snapping a shackle round the belly of the cloud, and this band, having come from a terribly tiny creature, naturally collapses down to a needle’s eye pulling all information in to lie compacted into glassy stone, very good for light casting.  The mass before the band naturally alters at having been so violently handled, and the mass afterwards also shifts to regain its comfort. 

If the author does not like that the world’s information after his book is still the world’s information as was, and that’s infinite, or that his work has only altered the course of information, and sometimes so minutely as to be noticeable only by the most severe of the experts, then there are two options open to him: 1 don’t write a book.  2 write a book and keep it locked away down deep in some mine, guarded with electrical explosive charges and those charges guarded by big dogs, blind dogs (you can never be too careful), and then he can tap dance on top of his work, having lassoed in all information, dance on top of the lid like jumping on a hammock strung across the muzzle of a volcano.  Or 3, he can accept that he is small, strong enough only to displace information, not unmake it, not invent it, not hold it still, and then he can go from there to forming beautiful displacements of the eternal.  If the critic does not like that he cannot and should not kill the author, then he’ll need to seek help and no doubt will be seated in the waiting room hip to hip with the tyrannical writer he thought to make his victim, fellow warlord of interpretation.  It’s our job to pray they don’t strike up a  conversation.              

 

 

 

 

PROLOGUE

Hail Science! Thou hast dipped into thy stores,
And from thy stores hast gripped an holy thing.
This newest fruit twas formed ‘pon heaven’s shores,
And for this fruit do angels gag to sing.
Oh double headed duel sexed Eden child,
The suns and moons do dunk thee in their tubs,
Down in their marble vats of blessings wild,
And bid thee know thyself with raucous rubs;
Then from thine loin-crossed deeds indeed shall rise
Two ruby souls; your conflict they shall seek.
By sweet incestual love, your conflict dies,
This battle which thou built by dueling cheeks.
Fair flesh-house Copulate and Moneytoo,
Your war is done, I bid You-You adieu!

 

 

 

 

 

The story truly begins before the action of this play, some sixty years before, at the birth of a miracle.  Its name is MOTHER-FATHER-YOU-YOU-MONEYTOO-COPULATE (YOU-YOU for short).  This is a heaven-built two headed humanoid, one half male (FATHER-YOU-MONEYTOO) and one half female (MOTHER-YOU-COPULATE).  Whenever YOU-YOU is not fighting, he/she is making love to itself and producing children, all of which display the parental miracle by emerging in sets of two, Siamese sets in fact, connected at various points. Sometimes (as in RONDO’s case) the twin is a mutation, a mere protrusion with a mouth.  But beyond these blessings, there is a curse: each twin-set is born loyal either to MOTHER-YOU or FATHER-YOU.  None honor both at the outset of our play.  This is the great civil war.  Only the young love of a surgically united pair may bring an end to the strife. 

 

 

Enter RONDO and his blind GOITER of the house of MOTHER-FATHER-YOU-YOU- MONEYTOO-COPULATE, hunting for deer with rifles (black-powder i.e. one shot only). (The actor playing GOITER can simply stand behind RONDO and rest his chin on RONDO’s left shoulder)

 

GOITER

Is a field a field back to Eden?  Has it never been anything else?

 

RONDO

I don’t know. 

 

GOITER

I say no. 

 

RONDO

A field is a field. 

 

GOITER

And that’s you saying you don’t know. 

 

RONDO

Well I don’t know. 

 

GOITER

(Loving himself heartily)

 Don’t worry.  It’s not for everyone to know all things.  But I include myself in this.  I know only few things, but my wonder, it shrouds all.  I hypothesize.  Call it my ministry.  A field, in your mind lives as a mole does on your skin.  You’d mark it as you would an island on a map, but you fail to question why it is an island at all and not a mountain, not a man – 

 

RONDO

Shhh.  A deer can hear twice as well as a man.

 

GOITER

(More quietly, but eventually back to full volume)

I question it.  The field, I think, is a field and neither island nor mountain nor man, for an island is the land’s reach into water where the field is a supernatural table’s leg’s underside in the forest – of course the forest is dust in this example as well as the hoisted table cloth i.e. maiden’s dress.

(Chuckles)

You witness only the space not the leg and this is because the supernatural only affects nature and not flesh – this is why we are not in the middle of the table leg, as I speak, but in fact in the open air, for – brace yourself –  nature and God are one, visible invisible, a singular thing, two expressing double standing and clearly a double-tongued –   

 

 

RONDO

O my word, shut up; you’ll drive all the game away.

 

 

GOITER

No.  We’ll see game.  There’s some now.

 

RONDO

You see nothing.

 

GOITER

I see vibrations.  The movement of things gives me sight.  At night, you have nothing.  At night, I have everything.

 

RONDO

Movement?  Then what am I doing now?

 

(Blinks his eyes)

 

GOITER

(Purses lips in thought)

Blinking eyes.

 

RONDO

Now?

 

(Smiles)

 

GOITER

Smiling.

 

RONDO

What about now?

 

(Far off branch snap.  RONDO holds gun more aggressively. Looks about

nervously)

 

GOITER

You’re…looking at something.  You’ve formed yourself into a wide and lovely stance. 

(RONDO looks right)

You’re looking right. 

(RONDO looks left)

You’re looking left…you’re swallowing an accumulation of saliva.  You’re adjusting your stance to dislodge your left Colonel which during our walk has become suspended in your loin-webbing…now you’re still...

(Whispers)

 What’s wrong?  What do you see?    

RONDO

Quiet!  Listen.

 

(Wind. Silence)

 

GOITER

(Whisper)

 Now you’re reaching for me. You move to stroke my skull, but your heart is conflicted.  You tremble. You second guess. Your passion drives you forward but you must not. You must not! But you wish it in your core, you wish it so; you are a salty man!

 

RONDO

There!  You hear that?

 

GOITER

No.  What is it? 

(Nervously)

Rondo?

 

(Moans with worry then turns and begins kissing the side of RONDO’s face)

RONDO

What are you doing? 

 

(Kissing continues several beats. RONDO pulls away. Kissing stops. RONDO looks at GOITER.  GOITER lunges to kiss RONDO on the mouth.  RONDO dodges and slaps GOITER)

 

GOITER

Ah!

 

RONDO

Be quiet!  Listen. 

(Silence. Wind)

Goiter?

 

GOITER

What do you see?

 

RONDO

(Pause)

 Why did you kiss me?

 

GOITER

Why not?  I always do.

RONDO

What?  No you don’t.  You never have.

(Looks at GOITER])

 When did you ever kiss me before? When? 

 

GOITER

Stop.  You’re trying to fight with me. 

 

RONDO

When?

(Reflecting)

 Has it been while I sleep?

 

GOITER

I never do that.  I pride myself that’s something I would never do.  Of course I could have.  You know I could have done anything in the dark, and…I’ve thought to do everything.  So that’s even harder...when its there, pushing on you, when it’s inescapable…

(Draws closer as though to kiss again)

 …when it’s filthy. 

 

RONDO

(Steadily leaning away from GOITER)

 What have you thought to do? 

 

GOITER

Nothing. 

(Casually)

Things.

(Laughs if off)

I’ve a little mind, remember; I don’t know half of what I say.  So, we’re fine.  Are we alright?  We’re alright.  Yes?  

 

RONDO

What things?  Tell me.

 

GOITER

Well, it’s complex.  It’s a complicated thing, Rondo.  When two companions have…traveled together, bathed together, slept together, for many years, certain things…develop.  That’s nature, my friend, I’m sorry.  Pure and sweet and clean and simple.  Think of when there’s a baby near by, or some other manner of adorable thing, a puppy or plump fish, a fresh kitten; do you grind your teeth when you speak to it? 

 

RONDO

Grind my teeth?  No.  Why would I?

 

GOITER

Exactly!  Why would you?  Why would anyone?  It’s the primal pull to consume.  Beneath love – which is a very thin layer of overstretched scum – underneath that, there surges an entire bestial kingdom.  Men have their wives and is it not customary and in our very makeup to tap them on the bottoms?  Swallow the tongue?  Just nip off that littlest toe and light it and smoke it like a little cigar?  In some countries, it’s very romantic. 

 

RONDO

What countries?  Kingdoms? 

(GOITER takes all this lightly)

You’re a mouth with teeth on a lump.  You can’t go anywhere but where I go, and I don’t go anywhere.  You can’t see, so you can’t read.  You’re a vain and horrible thing,  probably full of devils; you never shut your mouth to stop one from dragging itself in.  The only thing you can know is what I tell you.  If you’re truly worth anything, like you believe you are, you’ll be quiet and listen, and if you really love me, you’ll concentrate and will yourself to die. 

 

(Wind. Silence)

 

GOITER

You have the devil, my friend.  That’s clear.    

RONDO

Listen.

 

(Wind. Pause)      

 

GOITER

Rondo.  Let’s not fight anymore.

(Pause)

 Rondo?  I do kiss you at night.

 

RONDO

You won’t again.

 

GOITER

You can’t avoid the nature of it.  It’s natural!  Do you deny nature?

 

RONDO

I deny everything.

 

GOITER

Then there’s your doom.  You spelled it yourself.  I wish you’d be more careful.

 

 

 

RONDO

The only thing you can wish for is that I keep putting food into your mouth.  What if I stopped?

GOITER

What if I grew?

 

RONDO

Okay, stop.  We’re done.  You just…I just hate some of the things you think. 

 

(Silence

 

GOITER

Do you know why I kiss?

 

RONDO

You said; nature.  I don’t believe that, but it’s what you said.

 

GOITER

When I’m nervous, I kiss.

 

RONDO

That’s not true.  I’ve seen you nervous before, and you didn’t kiss then.

 

GOITER

It’s recent.  I’m maturing.    

 

RONDO

There’s nothing to be nervous about.  I heard something, that’s all.  It’s probably a deer, and that’s good.  We’ve got only a half-hour of light left so be grateful if you hear anything at all.

 

GOITER

And when I’m afraid…I….

 

RONDO

I promise there’s nothing to be afraid of.  We’re supposed to be here.

 

GOITER

Yes?  On whose authority?

 

RONDO

You-You’s.

 

GOITER

Are you sure it was the right You?

 

RONDO

Mother-You-Copulate.

 

GOITER

Did Father-You hear?

 

RONDO

He was sleeping when she gave the order.

 

GOITER

Okay, he doesn’t, for now.  But once he wakes up, you’d better know he’s going to know.  And once he does, he’ll send someone.

 

                        (A sound in the woods)

 

RONDO

Listen!

(GOITER begins licking the side of RONDO’s face.  RONDO, concentrating heavily on listening, only puts his hand between his cheek and GOITER’s face and GOITER without pausing, licks RONDO’s hand)

Stop.  I see them.  Stop it!  They’ll see. 

GOITER

(Continues licking)

Who is it?

 

RONDO

They’re You-Moneytoo’s sons.  If you don’t stop that, we walk out of this field right now and miss them.

 

GOITER

(Stops licking)

Where are they?

 

RONDO

Just about here.

 

GOITER

What should we do? 

 

RONDO

I’m going to be calm so that means you’re going to be calm.  They’ll speak and we’ll speak.

 

GOITER

And when they want to fight?

RONDO

Then we’ll fight in the name of Mother-You-Copulate.

 

GOITER

Good.

(Beat. Whisper)

 I can smell them.

 

RONDO

You’re going to hear them in a second.  Just be polite.  Remember, this is family.  Family can talk to family.

(Enter JIMMY and ALISTER. They share a stomach and so must hug one another and look over each other’s shoulders.  They drag the corpse of a deer behind them by a rope held in ALISTER’s teeth. Large hole in the side of deer – large hook in hole – this is how the rope is connected to the body)

RONDO

I see you found our deer.

 

(ALISTER laughs, rope still in mouth)

 

JIMMY

Do you snarl at us little mouth?

 

GOITER

I do snarl!

 

JIMMY

Yes, but do snarl at me…you disgusting cist?

 

RONDO

That’s it, Goiter!  Fire me up!

 

GOITER

Are you sure?

 

RONDO

What did I just say?

 

JIMMY

Careful, Rondo.

 

RONDO

Careful yourself!  Goiter now!

JIMMY

(Half weeping)

Father-You will hear about this.  Father-You sees all!  Father-You is love! 

(Aims rifle)

Love!  Love!  Love!  Love!

 

(GOITER screams battle cry then bites RONDO’s ear and holds on. RONDO inflamed by ear-pain aims and fires at JIMMY and ALISTER. JIMMY fires back – much, much smoke –  all miss; all come together and grapple. Enter RUMBLOCK-CHRISTOPHER-CALVIN two men joined by their rear-ends. They carry hunting rifles. CHRISTOPHER is quite heavy.  CALVIN is completely bald)

 

RUMBLOCK-CHRISTOPHER

Stop this!  Stop!  Idiots, there’s a warden!

(Pushes the fighters away from one another.  All stop fighting. Slaps GOITER; GOITER stops biting)

RUMBLOCK-CALVIN

How do you know there’s a warden?

CHRISTOPHER

You saw; his boat’s at the edge of the lake.

 

CALVIN

That doesn’t mean he’s there.  He parked it, but we have no idea where he is.  He could be anywhere, could be on the other side of the mountain.

 

CHRISTOPHER

He’ll hear the shot.

 

CALVIN

He’ll hear a thousand shots today.

(Beat)

 Hey you!

 

ALISTER

What?

 

CALVIN

Where’d you get that deer?  This is Mother-You-Copulate land.

 

JIMMY

Who pays for it?

 

CALVIN

Who keeps it!  Here, let me help you.

 

(CALVIN shoots rope out of ALISTER’s mouth.

ALISTER screams.  He and JIMMY attack CALVIN.  CHRISTOPHER, facing audience, shakes his head and waits.  RONDO watches in stupor until GOITER again bites into his ear. RONDO rushes into the battle.  With every strike against CALVIN, CHRISTOPHER grinds his teeth in pain.  CALVIN dies from a skull-blow delivered by JIMMY’s rifle butt. Enter MOTHER-FATHER-YOU-YOU-MONEYTOO-COPULATE. All fighting stops.  GOITER stops biting.  All watch MOTHER-FATHER)

 

MOTHER-YOU

What is this!?  You steal from my woods!

 

FATHER-YOU

Your woods?  I rent them! 

 

MOTHER

Well I care for them!  All you do is take and then take more and more and –

 

FATHER

But I always pay!  In gold!  In gold!  And you swore you love gold!

 

MOTHER

I do love gold.  I hate you!

 

(MOTHER-FATHER begins to struggle, all fight again, then MOTHER-FATHER begins to laugh and kiss and roll about on the grass, thick gold coins spilling out of FATHER’s pockets.  MOTHER breaks from kissing her husband only to take each gold piece she finds and consume it)

 

MOTHER

What should we buy, Father?!  What should we buy?!

 

FATHER

More deer, my love!

 

MOTHER

Oh!  Will they be youthful?

 

FATHER

Youthful!

MOTHER

Oh!  Will they be spotted when young and pumping muscle and fur and horn when they are old?

 

FATHER

Pumping muscle, fur and horn, My-You!

 

MOTHER

Oh, Father!

 

(Both begin eating the deer’s heart. Sound of gun shots.

Exeunt all quickly, though CHRISTOPHER is slowed for he drags behind himself the corpse of his brother, CALVIN, which hangs from his rear.  Enter ASHLEY. Attached to his back is a woman with no name)

ASHLEY

What happened to Calvin? 

 

CHRISTOPHER

What happens to anything?

(Sits down on top of his dead brother. To do this he must arrange the limbs just right.  Bend them, fold them etc.)

What are you doing out here?

 

ASHLEY

Dead?

 

CHRISTOPHER

There was a battle.  I’ve made a decision to continue with my life.

 

ASHLEY

How?

 

CHRISTOPHER

I don’t know, really. I think I’ll just do the next thing.  Dance, target shoot, have a costume party –

 

ASHLEY

No!  How’d he die? 

 

CHRISTOPHER

Got his brains shuffled.

 

ASHLEY

Oh!

 

(Covers his ears with both hands and closes his eyes tightly. CHRISTOPHER takes out his knife, cuts off his brother’s ear and tosses it at ASHLEY)

 

ASHLEY

(Ear strikes his face and he opens his eyes, unstops his ears and touches his face)

What was that?

 

CHRISTOPHER

June bug. 

 

ASHLEY

It felt wet.

 

CHRISTOPHER

Some are. 

 

ASHLEY

And it smelled.

 

CHRISTOPHER

Some do.  So tell me, why are you out here?  I’m curious.  You’re not hunting.  I can’t imagine you pleasure walking.

 

ASHLEY

(Can’t stop looking at corpse)

What?

 

CHRISTOPHER

(Covers corpse with the flaps of his jacket)

Why are you out here?  This is the deep woods. 

 

                                                ASHLEY

(Sighs. Leans back against WOMAN heavily. Legs extended, ankles crossed)

 I’m thinking

 

CHRISTOPHER

What about her?  Is that what she’s doing, thinking?  Plotting more like.  

 

ASHLEY

She goes where I go.  Never tells me she doesn’t want to go.  But she never tells me anything.  I’ve tried. Anything you can think up, I’ve tried it.  I’ve written to her, sung, composed ballads for the whistle, the sousaphone,

(Low and passionate)

the sax; I’ve whipped together full orchestral conflagrations. I painted her name across the government’s walls! I burned her initials into my thigh.  But she never looks there.  Even if she did, I cannot surprise her.  And it’s more than that, it’s…I love to be with her but when I need time alone…the time any man needs…to be alone…you know what I mean…she’s always there.

 

CHRISTOPHER

I know what you mean.  A man must explore himself before he can explore the world. 

 

ASHLEY

She’s always with me, sighing herself to death if I’m sick in the stomach.  I can’t even rip a clip of wind without driving a gag out of her.  I’ve tried to love her.  I can’t.  She hears none of my words.  To her, I am a stench of burnt flesh and a puff of flatulence.  I have to live like this.  You can’t imagine it, but I do.    

 

CHRISTOPHER

Ashley.

 

ASHLEY

There’s nothing you can say.

 

CHRISTOPHER

Do you know how old I am, Ashley?

(Pause)

Old enough, I’ll say that.  But it used to be Calvin and I, we had the blood in us to walk for entire days at a time. No rest.  No food. We’d just perch on a hill and pick a place at the edge of the sky, and go. Sometimes we’d make it by dark, sometimes not. We’d walk until morning, talking the entire way.  There’s nothing we haven’t discussed, nothing we haven’t argued or agreed on…under the stars…in the light of the moon…on December dawns in a world of ice and white.  I know his mind as well as I know my own, and he knew me better than that.  Conversation; it was rapid…it was a soaring bird.  We could accomplish half the words in existence just by pauses and quivers of the flesh.  Do you know what happened to us?

 

ASHLEY

No.

CHRISTOPHER

About two years ago, we stopped talking.  Do you know why?

 

ASHLEY

No.

 

CHRISTOPHER

At that moment, we had said to one another everything that can be said between two human souls.  I couldn’t even ask him what the sky looked like at my back.  I’d have to turn that way to truly know.  Our words were finished.  The part of him in my head died and my part in his died.  We were overfed.  Our decadence engorged us and we split apart.  I haven’t had a brother in two years, Ashley.  But you, you haven’t had a sister-lover all your life have you?  Have you, Ashley?

 

(ASHLEY shakes his head)

 

CHRISTOPHER

Watch.

 

(Takes the knife from his side, lifts up his dead brother’s hand and severs it)

 

ASHLEY

Stop!

 

CHRISTOPHER

Quiet!  Look.

 

ASHLEY

I don’t want to look!

 

CHRISTOPHER

Look or I’ll carve your little head off!

 

ASHLEY

It’s disgusting.  Let him rest.

 

CHRISTOPHER

He feels nothing, Ashley.  He stands alone in heaven.  He’s a love-dipped angel now.  Do you know how happy he is in heaven?  Do you?

 

AHSLEY

I don’t care. 

 

CHRISTOPHER

Yes you do.

 

ASHLEY

I don’t want to know.  Don’t cut him again.

 

CHRISTOPHER

I won’t.  Just tell me: how happy is he?

 

ASHLEY

He’s happy.  Now put the knife away.

 

 

CHRISTOPHER

That’s right.  He is.  And can you guess how happy I am?  Do you know the directions I could have aimed myself in, the distances I might have claimed in the days I walked?  Twice the distance?  No, ten times that and ten times again and that multiplied onward.  I could have walked the world and bathed it in my boot tread.  They’d know Christopher’s print in Asia…Brazil. They’d see it and worship in Canada. They’d build a tower of villains’ spines in Denmark in my honor. I could have seen every face on the earth, mastered all tongues and harvested a nation from my seed had I been alone.  And now…I am alone.  And now there is nothing I can do…but carry him. 

 

ASHLEY

Can’t you bury him? 

 

CHRISTOPHER

If I wanted to bury myself, too, yes, I could, and I may still, and I may not.  The point is, I can’t bury him without being buried.  An old man doesn’t heal like a young man, does he?  Say I cut you with paper; the line will heal by evening.  But you spell your name in me with paper and I’ll wear your name for the rest of my life.

 

ASHLEY

You shouldn’t have cut him.  I’ll see that you’re judged for that.

(Beat)

Stay here.  I don’t want you following us. 

 

CHRISTOPHER

Where are you going?

 

ASHLEY

To church.

(Smiles)

She trembles during the services. That’s the only affection I can glean.  And if that’s the feast I must take the rest of my life, then I will learn to be nourished by it.  I’m resigned to it.

 

ASHLEY turns and begins to walk away, WOMAN is now facing CHRISTOPHER.  After ASHLEY is a few paces gone, CHRISTOPHER stands and quietly comes after him, dragging his brother.  He draws his knife and cuts WOMAN’s throat.   ASHLEY screams and reaches back to touch the pain but cannot. WOMAN catches CHRISTOPHER’s face in her hands and kisses him hard then wilts. ASHLEY kneels.  CHRISTOPHER knocks the back of the youth’s head with the butt of his knife.  CHRISTOPHER cuts ASHLEY and the WOMAN apart.  Enormous blood spray. Fountain-like)

 

 

 

CHRISTOPHER

(Sheathes his knife down into his brother’s head. To ASHLEY)

 You will thank me.

 

                        (Wind. Silence. Blackout)

 

 

                                                            THE END

Illustration by Dan Williams