IDEA ONE: regarding distance.
Distance: how it brings depth to space.
In the comfort of the near and accessible,
we deal (easily) with the surfaces of things,
the surfaces of people.
everything is as it appears.
But in confronting the terrible-ness of distance,
one sees that places, people, things
are no longer innocent
but accompanied by a pain
the pain of the inability to endure the distance to reach them
and as a result everything takes on a depth
you can see through the skin of things
terribly see through them.
distance changes us, changes everything.
We SUFFER distances...
the distances between people...
insurmountable.
but perhaps, at times, put there on purpose.
IDEA TWO: relevance. The relevant revonant.
perhaps the greatest fear of the elderly (and arguably everyone)
is that they will become, or ARE, irrelevant
to the present discussion.
time is, after all, like an hourglass.
the future is the sand that is slipping gradually
the past is the sand that has passed and settled
the present is the narrowest point, where everything gathers
as through a fist
only to slip away through a minute hole.
the shape of time, the narrow present, is the same shape
of an idealized woman.
she too slips away,
somewhere between our
hopes and memories.
We can't hold onto her.
but back again to relevance.
it is not only a concern of the elderly
although it is perhaps felt most acutely by them
it is the concern of everyone
everyone wants to be RELEVANT,
a part of the present narrative,
a character in the story.
to be irrelevant is a fate worse than the
death of the protagonist, the death of the antagonist,
because at least their deaths matter,
have consequence.
irrelevance places one beyond the scope of things
beyond the scope of significance...
SO: a revonant, if i remember correctly,
is an undead spirit of someone who suffered a violent death,
it returns for one reason and one reason alone,
vengeance.
it cannot be stopped (except perhaps by fire)
until its thirst for vengeance has been slaked.
a relevant revonant... an irrelevant revonant.
a spirit whose vengeance no longer matters,
is no longer relevant???
IDEA THREE: the liberation of the stage
in the story Kipapa, and others (notably Exit Stage Right), there is the idea that the stage, that theatre, somehow is a liberation.
for an individual like Cliff, who "thinks too much,"
for whom life is like a chess board against an
invisible and all knowing adversary,
for whom the future is a possible Armageddon,
an unavoidable Atlantis (ala Plato)
an unavoidable Pompei (ala "Cities in Dust" by Siouxsie and the Banshees)
for whom strategy upon strategy cannot avoid a dark fate...
how is the stage a liberation from such a quandary?
to be someone else...
Replacements lyrics:
"If it's just a game,
then we'll break down just in case.
Then again,
I'll tell you what we can do:
You be me for a while
and I'll be you."
The theatre is a liberation and a cage... It is a liberation in the sense that it imagines the perfect audience, in the same manner that a writer must imagine the perfect reader, in the same manner (in a way) that a lover imagines the perfect love... The performance of an actor is always for this perfect audience, the audience that will recognize the transcendence of the actor into her role; acting is an extension of the self, an extending of the self INTO the another, through the mediation of the eye and ear and heart of an idealized audience... there are those that may hold that acting is actually a self-effacement, but that isn't accurate (at least I don't believe so); nor is it precisely self-expression, because those who hold roles to be mere mirrors of the self are not being flexible and true to the realities of their role... it is a self-extension, a stretching of the self outwards towards the role and towards the idealized audience...
the trap of theatrics is that it is always a performance for an other. in the absence of an imagined other, it does not know "how to act." It doesn't know how to "be oneself."
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