[OFF STAGE VOICE]: Que the gray... Hold the black. No lights! Ok, now tip toe in, center stage. Look straight ahead. Still now! Ok... go ahead.

The lights come up, an evenly diffused glow of LED upon creamy linen screens silhouetting a single figure standing center stage. The pale digital lumens seem to irradiate the back and sides of the figure, leaving the front shrouded in shadow.

[OFF STAGE VOICE]: Gray! And... Go!

Fog is injected into the atmosphere from stage left and right. The hiss of the fog machines is the only sound in the room, until suddenly the shuffling of the figures' garments becomes audible.

[OFF STAGE VOICE]: Go ahead!

A muffled voice clears its throat. Dampened, as though emitting through a cotton gag, slowly and deliberately, the voice begins to speak.

[FIGURE]: Space... Time... Concepts.... Where..? When..? What..? It's already finished, which is to say forgotten, but who is saying, and why of ends already at the beginning, and is it always just so or more, and will there always be more ands than justs? How just is that? Who's to judge? Erewhon; no-where, and now-when. Grissaille; the gray gradient grouting the sediments of sentiment, the in-between and outer-insides separating the uninhabitable islands of image, firmaments of feeling, fundaments of elements resonating within the vacuum of mass accumulations and matter convolutions, out there and here also. Begin again, back to the beginning that can't be located, so then again towards the other direction, ahead into the mists with no insides, no sides at all, following a beacon without roots, diffuse scrim of wave lengthening their particulated follicles of energetic momentum, electricity liberated from the copper veins, uncivilized sewers, subterranean rivers, Ganges of immanence, Styx tributary Lethe sinewing mind to mineral, meat to plague, flowing upwards through novel paradigms of physics beyond the apprehension of any mortal literature like a prehensile tale stitched along the black hole of Being.

FIGURE's voice becomes enveloped in a mild reverberation which escalates into a palpable, even violent, delay effect.

[FIGURE]: One cannot describe the place upon which one stands if it is devoid of all referents, without context, without the cold calm concrescence of moonlight or absorptive grounds. What is a tool if not a handle, the primary prosthesis, holstered to the hip or protruding out from the mandibles, probing and penetrating the orifices of dark velvet voids, always in relation to some Other or Othering that cannot be exfoliated directly, an extension of sense beyond the sensible, which is to say the reasonable limits of absurd utensils, but who is it that would proclaim such profanity? Profane or sacred, a curse nonetheless to rename anthropoidal creation as mere gleaning. All technology has been found, existed before the pragmatic could be articulated, before time keepers or utility closets, indeed before the priors and latters of taxonomy could be hoisted into place. If we are to start at any beginning surely it must be manufactured, if only through concepts, laid upon context, carved out of clotted waxes or congealed effluvial ether, but who is the we one might refer to? Is it this one who is speaking or that which is being addressed? Does the earth have substance or any straight lines for that matter, or matter for that lined up straight of like or downed minds might drown in sees of time, like great eyes swishing to the momentum of their own salienated fluids swathing the irises with limed tar pine for buoyancy, a compass standing at its own center for lack of poles or celestial fires, another river coursing through ontological capillaries, Pyriphlegethon of proprioception probing this homunculus incubating in a cocoon of hermeneutical honey or aphasiac antimony.

[ANOTHER OFF STAGE VOICE]: Wait! Stop. No, you can't be saying all that. These people aren't going to understand what's happening at all. You can't be riffing on the script that much, make it flow but mostly just read what's written. This isn't some fucking soap box for your own personal poetic promenade, this is art goddamnit and it's based in reality. I don't know what planet you think you're on but you have to use common words. Simple words for simple minds! Simple rhyming structures so that folks can understand! C'mon, I don't want to have to keep reminding you of this.

The video projections pause upon a still frame. A second figure engulfed in darkness steps on stage to give direction to the actor. During the lull some audience members begin whispering to one another.

[AUDIENCE 1]: (phew) I thought I was the only one.

[AUDIENCE 2]: What, you mean you don't understand the monologue? I thought you were an art student, aren't you used to this kind of stuff?

[AUDIENCE 1]: NO, I'm studying art HISTORY not studio art or postmodern art or avant-garde performance art or whatever you wanna call this. I mean, I'm all for poetry but this kind of absurdity is simply destructive. Art needs to mean something or it might as well not exist.

[AUDIENCE 2]: So this doesn't mean anything? Is it even possible for something, or any thing, to not carry some kind of meaning, even symbolically or psychologically or archetypally?

[AUDIENCE 1]: History will be the judge. There can be no poetry after Auschwitz, but everyone seems to have forgotten that and got all caught up in their own pulchritudinous ostentation again, and look at where it's gotten us, right back at the beginning, full circle, on the brink of total destruction. The end could be tomorrow, hell it could be today! And this is what I have to deal with in the face of total annihilation? Symbolic horror before the actual descends upon me? Some will to live...

[AUDIENCE 2]: Well that seems a bit contradictory to what you were saying in the car earlier... Maybe you should try to receive the experience before moving so quickly to a judgment of its contents, or even refrain from criticism all together until it has a chance to sink in..? Isn't there something to be said for the performance itself? Isn't life a series of performances that we confuse for reality? What is so real about the horrors of yesterday anyways, compared to the terror of this moment, or what is found in anticipation, of the next moment, or any other? How can you judge it if you don't give it a name? And what was your name again?

One figure begins to walk off stage. As the figure resumes speaking the video wall also resumes motion.

[OFF STAGE VOICE]: Quiet please! Go ahead.

[FIGURE]: So it begins again. So we begin again. At the beginning which is also ended, an always-already ceasing, false starts in the turbines of becoming potential exchange. A process, a conversation, a processing of conversation, a conversion of prophylactics, a pharmacognosis filtering pharmakon from pharmakos. A process of processing perhaps, perchance an encounter, a dialogue or dialectic, or a duel of dualities, pluralities promulgating between two points. "If I can have your attention, please," but is it yours to give? An incommunicable riddle, an aporia of atrophying apoplectic aphasia, phantasmagoria of pulchritude, philistinism, platitudes, or plateaus of consistency? Phrased as a question the labyrinth has no walls, ceases to be catacomb in its continually becoming untethered, but otherwise, in guise of solution, for dissolving or disfiguring or merely a device of dis-ing, of the negative - theological or otherwise - wisdom itself or a process of disentangling the Latin names from Lucifer or his cities. Down here then we can be located, at the bottom with more footing than floor, at the base serving as column, colander, centerpiece to a cavalcade of alliterative neural typical enunciations, let's set the table down there. Yes, a table, as an affirmation, a primary designation, imagined however you like as long as it serves the purely pragmatic purpose of placing things on it, in order to keep track of their positions. The cartographers can now tend to their archives, putting into production an entire cosmos of industrial processes - to be differentiated from our privatized pontifications - a phonetic autopoiesis perpetuating a procession of taxonomical technologies and noospheric ecologies for designing aesthetics, ethics, and affects of our exchange. So be it, but where? Yes at the bottom, at the first proclamation that what is said must be repeated, at the navel of the tautological wheel we are currently articulating. Not the word, but the ogling of orifices of oration. Not the pen, but the onomatopoeia that keeps its cuneiform circles gyrating. Here, between what is known and that seemingly great unknowable fog saturating ever utterance, within the gradient spectralizing the observed from the observer, at the twitch of the dance as it quivers from reflexion to reflection, at the shared earth we might both agree - with some well-tempered efforts - that we are both straddling. Put it down.

[OFF STAGE VOICE]: Bring in the table.

Two black figures bring in a matte black table, equal in all proportions, and place it silently before the Figure, leaving without a sound. The stage remains dark save for the peripheral illumination of the screen outlining the contours of the solitary Figure and table.

[FIGURE]: (pause) Go ahead. (pause) Process it. (pause) Yes, remember. The beginning is the space, the context, the positioning in relation, the enunciation of a reference, a place to put one's head, but not for sleeping! (An almost painfully loud Pathagorian chord chimes through the hidden speakers) One must be awake if they are to speak freely, minus the incapacitating encumbrances of ontological paradoxes, outside of identity, mouths leveraging minds balancing upon trajectories not transcendental territories, thunder tongues talking the tinny tinned tones of their own dental fortifications, beyond the pearlescent enamel barriers of the visible bone, towards the cooing swami song of the terrestrial gong, the cantos of the earth spelling out its own consonant incantation, the rhyme and rhythm of Promethean provocation, the spells predating anthropoidal enchantment, the orchestrations of ore boring down deeper into their own ulcers, fueled by friction, no longer by fictions fastidiously fastening our appendages of meat and prosthesis down upon the substrate of plastic. Pull back the sheathing to expel the insulating intonation. Now is the time to be retuned, listen! With your ears formed from eons of earthquakes, attuned to archetypal archipelagos of awareness, modulating modalities of the meat-mind humming sympathetic vibrations in a sea of morphic resonance. At this point, at the locus of our interlocution, upon the scrim of a sensuous manifold projecting out from a clandestine curvilinear center, let us agree that we have a surface, more or less solid, which might support the addition of other elemental postulates, not so that we might move on, but rather indeed linger here a little longer, immerse ourselves in it, to observe its characteristics, which is to say define our own definite distinctions, thereby beginning the bifurcated dialogue of immanence that must be uttered less we fade away irresolutely, irrevocably, irrationally, into the rearing void of silence.

Silence...

[OFF STAGE VOICE]: Give it a minute... let it get kinda Cage-ian...

Silence...

[FIGURE]: Attention is not yours to give. (pause) The universe is a black love.

The Figure slowly walks backwards through the projection screen scrim, out of sight. The first stage light slowly rises, center stage, directly above the table, projecting a symmetrical shadow underneath its simple black mass. The projection screen scrim is raised to reveal a simple black stage wall.

Silence...

[AUDIENCE 1]: So what's that supposed to mean then?

[AUDIENCE 2]: You mean you still don't get it? It's just an introduction serving as an antithesis of itself, like a false start that acts like an illusion to something we only think we can see. Like life or something.

[AUDIENCE 1]: But wasn't there already a beginning? Is the whole thing gonna be a beginning with nothing happening?

[AUDIENCE 2]: I dunno, maybe. Isn't it always? I think it's more interesting than some of the other shit I've seen in galleries lately.

[AUDIENCE 1]: You think that boredom and linguistic masturbation is interesting? I think that says more about you than this performance.

[AUDIENCE 2]: Well, yeah. It's like breathing in a yoga class or something. You have to hang up your ego at the door and get mentally prepared to melt into the blackness of your own mind, or to observe your thoughts passing without trying to control them. I like how Zen it is.

[AUDIENCE 1]: So you want your art to be like a yoga class...

[AUDIENCE 2]: Well, no... I don't even want yoga to be like a yoga class. I'm just saying I think I get it and maybe it's more simple than you're letting it be.

[AUDIENCE 1]: Actually, I think it's more simple than I care for it to be, so simple it's dumb which makes me feel dumb for watching it.

[AUDIENCE 2]: But you're also participating in it, so does that mean you're dumb?

[AUDIENCE 1]: I prefer the term "idiot..." There, ask that director guy what he thinks.

[AUDIENCE 2]: Fine. (speaking at full volume) Excuse me sir! My friend here is having a hard time with the content and was hoping for a little explanation. Would that be possible?

The Anthropologist/Amateur Ethnomusicologist walks on stage, leaving a trail of white footprints along the otherwise black floor, and sits on the table with the posture of an academic. He lights a cigarette. As he speaks it becomes obvious that he is the off stage voice heard earlier. He speaks with a mixture of accents sometimes resembling Texas Honkytonk and at other moments performing a poor imitation of a British pronunciation.

[A&AE]: Questions already? Well I'll see what I can do. It's really quite clear I think. There's this dark fella on the stage and he's trying to tell you all about the mysteries of the universe and all that but it's rather difficult to give a simple description of a rather complex system of interrelated occurrences so he has to go on and on with all this poetic jargon in a kind of absurdist manner until we enter into a trance state and begin to visualize the whole thing through the semiotic activation of the pineal gland. So it's kind of like psychoactive literature, right? Put the key in the lock, all very predictable. But this darky ain't too sharp so he's getting some of the concepts mixed up, trying to use chaos to describe something extraordinarily ordered, so it all gets kinda blabbered up, incoherent, like the Mayan calendric system described by a noobie academic field lab assistant during his first tour of field work out in the middle of the jungle having just accidentally ingested a small dose of psilocybin. You're supposed to feel this kinda placebo effect, like that study that was performed on a group of evangelical southern Baptists in church... some of them were really feelin' it and others were just percolating to the other cooker, steam evaporating on the window, the god illusion (or delusion as I've always said). Anyways, just calm down there and lean back and get cozy over with yer buddy and get yourselves a little entertainment. I mean c'mon, it's only theater or performance art or whatever... I can never remember because they keep calling it different things. You should be glad that they're not wearing tights and twirling around like fairies up here, because that would be evoking some seriously deep seated Nordic hallucinations which we can really only understand in relation to Santa Clause and all that jazz about the cultural appropriation of pagan totemism (or is it Tokenism?) by the pillaging colonial terror, rewriting sacred Zoroastrian texts to be superimposed over all that hedonistic hogwash, like it was any more authentic or original or natural than anything else. Hmph. It's all primitivism you know? Have you read my dissertation? I'll spell it all out for you another time, but for now just understand that you should be entertained like any ol' art, checks and balances, bought the ticket so take the ride kinda thing. You paid to get in here didn'tcha? Want your monies worth don'tcha? Have a good time, have the best time, and by that I mean to say that you should try to get into it, try it out, feel the pulse of the cosmic drum and all that, be a participant and don't interrupt the flow of the performers, like really get into what they're saying up here, cause theater is really no different from magic and that's all about belief and presence and the inculcation of the influence through ritualistic ceremony. It's theater or art or whatever, yah? You gotta try to believe in what you're hearing for it to work, for the magic to take effect, otherwise why even bother? Might as well stay at home with some spam steak and fast forward through it on TEVO, would be cheaper and way less hassle. But you're cultured folk that's interested in the truth of things and that means experiencing it for yourself and having all kinds of opinions about it so just go ahead and do that and try not to spoil things for the others, yah?

Before the audience members have a chance to speak the lights suddenly go out. The theater is in complete darkness. A low even monotonous tone fades up through the sound system and a new voice begins to speak, in a slow steady and almost monotone voice, pitched at a third interval up from the tone.

[OFF STAGE VOICE]: Yes, but this production is also concerned with numerous other elements which you are not attending to. We are concerned here with affect and percept, not only the rational temperaments. It's about feeling, feeling feelings, and feeling through the feels of being felt, feeling Being being felt, more than merely empty pseudo-philosophizing, of being here, seeing this, yes, but also being and seeing, of this place and this voice and the interactions ensuing between various elements. At the enunciation of any beginning lies a problem. There are myriad nested questions pertaining to how to begin alongside where to begin, or if it has already begun, and if so how and why it came to be initiated. Is there reference to thinking or speaking, of thoughts or speech, of transcriptions of utterances through technologies of writing, from recitative to libretto, thought to text, or otherwise? Is theater concerned with the state of the actors, of the authors, of the audience, or otherwise? Is art to be concerned with the questions of philosophy in any sense, or merely of sense itself, and how might we distinguish between them if not by speaking out through another process which does not sit so comfortably in either compartment? How does one communicate with or through their own affect and percepts, avoid becoming an amateur philosopher or inattentive creator, avoid becoming an idiot, autodidact, or egotistical orator of idiocy? Must certain questions come before others, or are there multiple process being conducted simultaneously, necessarily or willingly, consciously or subliminally, attentively or through sheer negligence? Must they remain simultaneous? Must we consider their multiplicity, or exercise a propensity to singularize, over any other potential course? How might one maintain their attention upon the whole without becoming lost, losing their own singularity or multiplicity or simultaneity, among the constituent parts of that which is being observed, and for that matter can there even be said to be any difference, in matter, or by manner of one postulate to another? Where does the illusion of the "I" give way to the clarity of the eye? Is one speaking, to oneself, to each other, or more generally, can one ever be truly heard? Must thought have an object upon which to focus it's inquiries, attention, senses, or any other hermeneutical instruments? Is life filled with meaning, vast emptiness, or perhaps something, or some non-thing, altogether, or otherwise? This opera, which may or may not be an opera strictly speaking - if we can speak of such strictures - does have a title, does propose a direction, a trajectory from a place which must first be described, agreed upon, or recognized. From the known variables of consciousness towards the unknowable mysteries of this particular human imagination, these questions seem to imply that all of history is fair game, to the extent that it can be recalled into objects. All of creation, the artworks and the minds which created them, the philosophers inquiring into the truth of reality, and scientists and mystics in like manner, how is one to comprehend the totality of their accomplishments, if any are said to have been made? If we might deem any such inquiry to be useful in our search for purpose, meaning, legitimate answers to the follies of our existence, shared or disparate... what may be evoked? How does one judge their legitimacy? Is this beginning, which seems to have always-already begun, merely a false start? Must one begin at all, is it a question worth asking? This narrator proclaims that it is necessary to ask, to act through asking, to contextualize the parameters within which a conversation may unfold, and to allow for an awareness of the peripheries that we must work around, to move towards that territory, which may or may not exist, beyond the thresholds of our comprehension, the impossible, if it is deemed to be possible to do so. This introduction follows itself through discursive momentum. It has a purpose: to create a list, many lists, a vocabulary of words denoting concepts represented through symbols embodying affects and percepts of the human organism. We or one, I or other, must define some variables so as to make visible a material to be worked with, worked upon, worked through, worked within, to be worked. What is this work, this labor? Is there a better word or a better concept? These actions, this energy, this momentum; it begins here as this seems to be the most sensible beginning, according to the capacities or capabilities of the senses. Perhaps it's not being created, only discovered, found ready-made, and if so then therein lies an inherent legitimacy, that it came before any "us" which may be defined, hence the circles carved out through this perpetual prologue. From this place which feels so incomplete, continuously interrupted, riddled with holes and paradoxes, always implying its own parallax view even as it struggles to enunciate a clarity of singular perspective, we will begin. Of course this is where we will begin, as it has already and already begun. What is less certain is where it will lead if anywhere, what it will amount to if anything, what can be made of it or out out of it, as a process, as a destination, as a territory to be inhabited if only for awhile, at least in some way, so as to ruminate upon the least of variables that are necessary for thoughtful action to occur. This procession is propelled by a will to action, towards understanding its own willfulness and comprehending its own peripheries of comprehension, of itself and its constituents and its relations, if any. Perhaps it sounds vague, excessively abstract, absurd or cruel, overly philosophical or foolishly archetypal, perhaps merely a tactless aesthetic, taboo style, or poor decision, but certainly it must be recognized as a viable attempt to enunciate a proposition, a language of materials, and ecology of processes accountable to the community of organisms attempting to reflect upon the circumstances of their own irrational existence. From here the possibilities may seem infinite, limitless, but on the contrary we have now, through the practice of intention, by heeding the influence of intuition, demarcated what might be said to be initially and provisionally known. What will follow may be more of the same - equally incomprehensible - while maintaining the potential of becoming something radically other, that which defies naming but not understanding. Now that time is palpable and space seems to be inhabitable we may begin the pertinent exploration of those voids waiting to be filled by feeling through the container slipping over the invisible contents, to will them beyond the compartments of the imagination, to make tactile the ether engulfing proprioception, an illumination of the unseen, a flavor for that which defies all fidelity of the familiar. This table is a metaphor, a symbol, an archetype, an image. It is. We have made it. We continue to be active in its making. We will put it to use and define ourselves in relation to its potential uses. From here we can take a position, articulate our own orations, locate our selves by distinguishing what is from what still might become. We will begin to process our own process-ing as one is to many, one entry into a cosmos of potential awarenesses. This table, this beginning, this universe, this propulsion. The universe is a black love.