Monolith Chair, image by Daniel Y. Harris
IMPROVISED
ANGLES
The assumption is that scripts are
firmly embedded in your mind. Short of blood dripping on the stage you will
keep going. Blue chair, air, a white sheet of paper. Calming, the absence of
discourse.
Would you trade the ability to
speak coherently for muscle currency? Lift, stretch, shift within the skin. We’re
not so much debating frames of reference as the opposite side of the set: blue
air, chair strewn with papers. As if to say, the script is unfinished, only
sporadically thought out.
Unexpected signs risk taking on too
much importance. Like the blue chair and next to it, in the shadow, the sheet
of white paper. So that it becomes possible to dream of a later, more
comprehensive beauty. To love by definition.
No dream rivals the forms of the
body. The actors are moving toward, but not explaining each other. Not going
anywhere in the blue air. We have drained our symbols and want our theater cold
and impartial.
To demonstrate: the play always
contracts the two extremes of time to center-stage now where they are
cancelled. The writing in blue on the white sheet of paper on the chair is less
a prop than a program. The hands of the young man are not abstract but on your
head. Is this part of the script?
There is no way to see beyond
what’s in plain sight. The stage, the blue chair. Even though language enables
the division of labor the script fails to document the blue air, team work,
homeostasis. Even without an author, words fill up the stage.
—Rosmarie Waldrop
Rosmarie Waldrop’s Gap Gardening: Selected Poems is just
out from New Directions. Her novels, The
Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter and A
Form/of Taking/It All, are now available in one volume from Northwestern
UP; her Collected Essays, Dissonance (if
you are interested), from University of Alabama Press; her memoir, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading
Edmond Jabès, from Wesleyan UP. She
translates German and French poetry (Elke Erb, Friederike Mayröcker, Edmond
Jabès, Jacques Roubaud) and co-edits Burning Deck books with Keith Waldrop, in
Providence RI.
