ACT1 SCENE2

The montone drone of the last monologue resonates through the room, almost imperceptibly panning to various corners as though a caged animal surveying its domain, carefully testing its parameters, silently plotting escape, until it finally fades from perception. The front stage lights fade up and a giant projection screen, spanning the length of the stage, steadily descends from the ceiling to the floor. A clear, calm, even, dry, natural voice begins speaking as though emanating from the room itself.

[NARRATOR]: Hello. Allow me to introduce myself. Hmm, you see it's a little bit tricky as I lack a proper name, at least in any form that you might recognize as properly naming my person or personality in any personal - which is to say idiosyncratic - manner, but we've decided that it's pretty important for us to become acquainted - you and I that is - if any rational sense is to be made of this spectacle we all seem to be implicated in. (pause) Yeah, but speaking of which, you know it's not always necessary to rationalize our experiences in order for them to be valid, and in some instances it may even be deemed invalid to do so, or inappropriate in consideration of the inherent potential of other qualia of feeling-through or sensing-around what is happening. We like to call those myriad affects and percepts that continuously unfurl themselves before us the "feeling feels," kinda a play on the signified of sensation altogether, yah? I mean, what is it to feel at all? If we can come to understand, either through intuition or determined focus or any other means, that the quasi-mythological schism separating mind and body is really just that - quasi and mythopoietic, a relic of a bygone cogito long since evaporated into the fragrance of phenomenological infusorial hay bundles - then how should we continue to understand the epicenter of sensation from which all of our empirical experience is said to emanate? (smiling) Well... let's put that aside for now. First things first, as the colloquialism goes. I love that turn of phrase because it really means very little etymologically, while connoting so much to our socio-linguistic sensibilities. Sensibilities! How about that for a nutshell, eh? What are first things anyways, as though any material element or ontological object or aesthetic propulsion, either through scientific function or philosophic agitation or artistic consternation, upon an edifice conceived through naturalization or socialization or heterogenation or glossolalic incantation, could be observed to contain a number, to be put into ordered sequence, within a hierarchy of any taxonomical imagination? Smells like the essence of the anthropocene to me, the first cut into the flesh that ultimately carved out our elegant cerebral vicissitudes from the juicy pulp of the orgone sponge, a fleshy node wedged between our plump little pontification portholes. We are going to take for granted that any talk of bodies or minds or coherency or reverie, or any other corporeal or conceptual resonation, is describing a whole, a unity, even if not always a singularity, for every child knows that no stone is uniform through to the core and even the wondrous white washing of the sun can be spectralized into a radiant prism of death if unleashed upon the innocent proletariat mitochondria of the superorganism attending to the seed strewn all over the earth.

Whispering is heard from offstage, drawing the attention of the Narrator and reminding him of the time.

[VOICE]: (whispering) Four minutes twenty seven seconds!

[NARRATOR]: Hmm? Ah, ok. Well anyways, you'll hear plenty about all that from everyone else, this night bleeding into the morning, one day superimposed upon every other, one big dinner party of amateur aesthetes debating the nuances of cheese and port pairings, silk liners or cork insoles, pensive toppers or power bottoms, like the Parthenon inverted upon its axis to become a theater for moles imitating the bulbs they feed upon. Right, well like I said let's dispense with the introductions then so we can inch our way forward through the seemingly infinite morass of teeming calcified doxaologies. What's that saying? Opinions are like assholes? I think of them more like asses, you know, those wild equestrian ancestors that serve as draught or pack animals to those living below subsistence levels. Hmm, yes, but even though we've been domesticating asses and opinions alike for thousands of years, we kindly ask that you keep your beasts of burden to yourselves. We're more interested in solipsism that sophism here this evening. So where was I... oh yes, so like I was saying, names don't really seem to cling to me, or rather my life is too brief to be living shackled to a pedigree, so you can just think of me as the nameless narrator, and as the narrator is now present I suppose some sort of narrativity must be prescribed, and I suppose I should be the one to attend to it then. I'll give it a whurl, but no promises as to its intrigue. This is supposed to be a serious production after all, dedicated to a rigorous rumination upon the methodologies of hermenutics, epistemologies of the will to live, ontologies of the human organism, revisionist physics of the terrestrial enclosure, and at the same time is to be some succinctly symbolic spectacle superimposed upon existential sociological architectures pumped full of profound anthropological specimens and some provisional yet necessary proclamation on the contemporary considerations of art in the age of accelerated apocalypse, in a nutshell! One night only! Sounds like quite a show, indeed, but I don't promise anything. I'll do my best to string you along for the more complicated bits but I'm only one voice ya know, only capable of so much blabbing before this production becomes just about me, the one that's not even supposed to be here or there but somewhere inbetween, so I can't be blathering on all evening about all the neurological nitrate esters and the paradoxes of the Copenhagen perspective of applied phsyics, you gotta do the work yourselves! Keep on your toes, try to read between the lines, sort out the elephants from the illusions and all that. Think of it as your job, yes your responsibility. (pause, looking around) What, you don't think you have a responsibility even as a spectator? That you can just sit pretty behind a two way mirror (or is it one way mirror...), upon a throne of Kantian judgement, docents of doxology dispensing with dissonances however you see fit? No no, you have a role to play as well, just like any other purchase you made today or throughout your entire existence. It all goes back to somewhere, a source, an origin, like the ass you rode in on, a petroleum fueled nightmare of innate responsibility, the terrors of capitalism! (faster) What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose name is the Mind! (pause) Damn that's a great poem, Ginsberg yah? The Beats yah? Those tweed clad cats could really get down, because civilization began pulsating bloody beat pulp penumbra poisons from its own pharmacies, Plato's republic, the evils of utopia and all that, and the kids were lost and needed a voice so those Harvard chaps strapped on some pants and dropped some black beauties and hit the street in a frenzy to start stirring the pot in the other direction. There's many instances of this throughout history of course, re-written or forgotten by those in control of the iron curtains. Man is the fucking bastard... powerviolence for a fallen species....

[VOICE]: (whispering) Alright alright, we gotta move on.