Saturday, May 26, 2012

surrealist play about love

(Because it is a surrealist play, he writes on the bodies of all the skeletons from the models of paintings from Vienna in the 16th century.  There's music, unaccountably, playing in the background.)

HE (writing):  The candle holder is angry, a drunken constable.

HE (speaking): Note to self: what is a constable?

HE (writing): And there are seven dogs surrounding my bed, because they have come from the sea they are wet and they are angry, dressed like hierophants, and making shadows on my skin that are the signs of the winter coming fast.

HE: (speaking): It's not even close to winter, this is so brilliant.

HE (writing): And suddenly quite without warning, he blows a high pitched whistle.  The dogs make no notice, because they are from the land of the dead, or the sea of the dead, they are from the dead sea.  But his daughter, Melancholia, she notices, and she is angry, angry like the sea and the dead.

(Sound of daughters singing songs that remind them of their fathers, who are not around as much as they wish.)

HE: (writing): My hand grows extra thumbs, and they are all covered with the blood of this goddam war, the very goddam goddamed war.  Generals disguised as insects come through the wounded gaping holes, and everyone becomes entirely aroused.  In the antechamber, there are women in leather with vampyr teeth, beating each other with whips made from living cat-tails, and pouring melted wax from silver chalices over each other's chests, and there is a song about the inquisition playing softly from the mouth of a dead walrus.

FRAUNQUAY (enters, drinking a miller): How, how, how.  How will the wax stay melted.

HE: Fraunquay!  How did you find me here, I've been hiding for centuries, and now I am the undead, filled with longing, longing, longing for you.

FRAUNQUAY: How will the wax stay melted in the chalices.  It's winter.  It would congeal, like the blood of a two-headed ram.

HE: Oh, you could always see right through me, and now here I am before you, a broken shard of nothing particularly interesting.

(But oh, ho ho, there's more, because HE dies suddenly, because he is not writing anything interesting these days, and there is a MINOTAUR in his place.  The MINOTAUR has an interesting head, shaved, of course -- everyone's head is shaved in this -- and he is wearing spectacular black leather boots.)

MINOTAUR: How, how, how do you like my boots?

FRANQUAY: I want you.

MINOTAUR: You cannot have me, because I am elusive, like the flying dogs that tore you from your mother's womb.

(And tun-tun-tun, the devil's symphony starts to play, and it's a tango with clothes made of barbed wire.  No one turns without a little blood, because it is the time of the running of the bulls, and we are all so very savage.)

SHE (enters, and writes): She was contemplating the delicate flower that lived inside of her skirts, and saw how it was growing fangs and filled with bullets and the memories of a thousand dead men and women who dared to know her.

SHE (speaks): I am tired of writing, because the things that we are when we are locked inside of our animal skins are always much more suitable for the time of year when the girls in their summer dresses are incinerating from within, from the terrible heat within.

(And the dance becomes unexpectedly elegant, like a poem about love that got lost between translations in a hundred imaginary flights between then and now.)

End

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