SKETCH FOR ACT II

OPERA OF/FOR KNOWN & UNKNOWABLE UN-I-VERSES

Complete blackness. The sounds of pouring water into a kettle, placing it upon a stove, lighting the flame and the flow of natural gas singing caked oil on the steel vessel. The hiss of steam, the slow rise of heat percolating through liquid, then the chaotic chant of rolling boil. The sound of the kettle being taken off the stove, poured into a decanter, the sizzle of melting coffee granules being gently stirred, a wooden utensil thudding the side of a glass vessel. Silence, with a slow awareness of a sound of heat, a contact mic on the side or in the soup of the hot liquid. The audience is simmering, steeping, waiting. The smell of coffee fills the air.

Narrator 1: Before the beginning there was already a having-had begun, a living motion preceding the actions of death, an apriori violence stirring the celestial churn of black butter-baked biscuit-models of atomic forehand/backhand - Platonic table tennis frothing foamy head lagers of liminal proto-sentience. Before the conversation began there was always-already a collaboration, a symbiotic sympathy transpiring between transmogrifying transmissions, terminal in their timed meters and well-tempered tinsel strengths, already plural and implying through an absence (often mistaken for void) the interminable presence of the other, always-never being completely anterior to the self-same-likenesses of the only-one speaking itself through various bodies and disembodied allegories of tongues, instruments, resonance chambers, and alchemical pelicans. Before the first words were uttered there were already sounds weaving aetheric tapestries upon the loom of distance, minute poems of unbridgeable breaths aligned across invisible polygons of concrete physics and fluid dynamics, salienating the water droplets condensing collisions in a vacuum soon to realize its own elasticity through imagination, that most primitive art sans form. Before the first characters appeared, before the first actors were enlisted, before the theaters premiered in the prisms of morning dew and the first poems were inscribed in the shadows of leaves, there was the heat in the center, burning a hole through the wholeness of presence, blowing warm airs over the cratered particulated dusts of non-named elements, a breath without lungs, a voice beyond chords, the sigh eternal for no use of timed constraint, an inhalation of the void immersed in its own empathetic ocean, quivering the geltaninous gradient bleeding out in the no-thing which can never be spoken, within which we will never dream, beyond which there is no pontificating, that most succinctly profound alien otherness outlying this uni-verse, which must tell its own story through its own mimetic bodies, when it is ready, if ever. Before there was one, there was none, and only by way of its own infinite facets splintering off into quasi-quandries of requisite somethings could a singular side be sewn, and it is here that we meet our first impediment, the first whisper, not a beginning so much as a remembering of that song of eternal return always-already cooing itself into hearing, by rites over range.

[ Narrator 2 enters and sits down at the table. ]

Narrator 2: I'm trying to remember that conversation we had this morning. It started with coffee but never really ended, went somewhere else. I remember something about drugs, capitalism, teenage punk rock, video games.... it felt like we were talking about anarchy, but it also wasn't about that at all. How did it start?

Narrator 1: It started with coffee. You wanted to drink coffee but didn't have any to make, which is funny because you work at a cafe, so I made you some. Then we started talking about coffee. It's one of those things that everyone needs, most essential, greater than food but lesser than narcotic, impossible to imagine living without once one is hooked.

Narrator 2: Yeah we were talking about the experience of coffee, in the body, but also in the mind, how it comes on in waves, like an ocean. It's usually a hot liquid but feels more like stepping into a cold stream, shivering and moving over rocks in a way which is kinda violent. It rises and falls, breaks stones, chisels away at the shoreline eroding away the substrate, moving around the soils and redistributing the matter in new ways. Factories always have coffee, all businesses really. They say it's the capitalists drug, the real fuel of industry, but it's also its own industry. It's a product of energy and money, making energy to make money to make energy to make more money. It's kinda sick in a way, or is indicative of a sickness. I don't mean the plant makes us sick or that it is physical, but maybe it is that a bit too, a pharmakon which activates in small doses and poisons the body and the mind when consumed in excess, no but I mean that we're sick because we're out of balance. It makes us go too fast, too far, like it's unnatural even though it's a natural product, from a plant. It's too concentrated and too readily available and we just drink too much of it, like as a society ya know? Our society is sick and coffee is one of those things that can measure that illness, like a social barometer, like alcohol or tobacco or marijuana, or other substances which could have beneficial properties that are consumed beyond reasonable limits.

Narrator 1: Hmm... I couldn't imagine writing without coffee. I need it to make decisions. Like if I'm in the studio trying to record some music I could just get lost in it, if it's too free or casual. Drinking coffee makes it a little faster, more serious, like I can decide that something is worth keeping so I can move on to the next thing, but maybe I also produce a lot of excess that way. I dunno, sometimes maybe it's all excess, but even that can be important too, shitting it all out to purge the palette and be able to go to more exciting unexpected places, right? Coffee does that to the body too, makes me shit a lot, gets all that stuff out that I'm consuming all the time. I like to wake up and drink coffee on an empty stomach and feel it rumble around in there, like there's some wrestlers choking on each other's saliva as they strangle each other, no but it's not so violent, more like a little dance, a jig, a twitch that tunes my clock to the right time, ticking ticking ticking click click clikc and then BOOM it's time! And it's time to go! Gotta go now! And I just shit it all out and everything is light again, a big reset button, starting over from scratch and clean like a baby, and then I just sit down and beat it all out while riding that energy. I can't do that by myself. Yeah it's like coffee is this other thing, like it's my friend and it helps me get my ass into gear, makes me get going. It makes me sad to think about living without it, physically depressed and also like I would be losing this friend that is always giving me these little presents, songs and notes, and whispering new inspirations in my ears. Sometimes it makes me sick, just like spending too much with anyone though. Sometimes people make me sick. At least with coffee I get to choose how much I take in. People aren't always so easy like that.

[ Narrator 3 enters and sits down at the table. }

Narrator 2: It's like a person, and it also is a kind of person, or what's the difference I guess..? Sure yeah... there's all these stories wrapped up in coffee. You're describing it like a muse, like a presence or a person, and some of that is you dialoguing with yourself, and some of that is the coffee, it's influence and it's wants and desires, what it is willing through you. The pharmacognosis of the coffee plant... we could say its spirit or its essence, and also its psychology - or at least how it influences our own psychology, our pharmacology - and the flavors of its philosophy, or the flavors of our philosophy while drinking coffee, the conversations and frequencies that it instigates and encourages, from the cultivation and colonialisation of the plant and the daily rituals infusing our routines and the psychotropic effects it has upon the brain and the body. We care for it, help it colonize the planet, destroy the integrity of natural ecosystems to proliferate this botanical species, but its also the fuel for our own colonial expansion, right? Coffee and chocolate, sugar and spices and all the exotic luxuries of the world determining our human industries as consumable products. Who is serving who? There's all kinds of other stories too, beyond just economic or political or territorial concerns, of poetry and paranoia and delirium tremens, that parallax mirror swirl of the cosmos briefly glimpsed as milk is stirred into a strong brew, the associations of home comforts swimming in the smells, the nuances of flavor running the gamut of the tongue's sensitivities, from sweet to bitter and back again, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and the student and the idle dreamer, and all the others too, conspiring and agonizing and incantating and amourizing in these places where coffee is served. The rise of the urban intellectual! Maybe the death of the old world too. Do we tell ourselves these stories or is coffee telling its tales through us?

Narrator 3: I'm so conflicted about all this.

Narrator 2: You're always conflicted about everything!

[ Laughter. ]

Narrator 3: You're right, that's true I can't deny it, but don't say it like it reveals something about my character rather than recognizing that everything is a potential point of conflict, more agonism than antagonism. I mean, on one hand I think you're right about all that, how it's a capitalist drug, the fuel for industrialism and industrialization and industrial ideology and industrial iconography, and how it perpetuates these infinite cycles of commodification, directly and indirectly and probably in all kinds of psychic ways you didn't even touch upon, but it works in other ways too. I mean, it's not just that, not only those things, but possibly other things too, at least potentially. You're always going on about how the stories we tell stories through story the narrative of our reality, right? Well isn't this a case of manifesting a manuscript of servitude, and couldn't it just as well be one of emancipation, or of some other kind of story with no masters, or at least some journey towards articulating such a world?

I've worked at coffee shops my whole life. They have sustained me, and gotten me at least this far, and I don't feel like I'm a part of those systems that you are describing. Well, not directly at least, not consciously. Even though I'm slangin' those beans with my time I try to be conscious and intentional with how I present myself to the world. I want to be an empty vessel, a conduit, filling up with all the filth and the bullshit, all that propaganda, the stuff that's evil and the stuff that claims salvation too, all that shit. Drinking coffee is like preparing for battle, mentally but also physically, like gearing up for that constant warfare that is the world. I want to go out there and fill up with all that shit and then just BLAAAAAAAAH let it all out! And scream here it is! Here's the world! And give it all back again, put all that shit out there so everyone can see it AAAAH! Yeah, I wonder if I could do that without coffee.

Narrator 1: It's like the farmers I met in Indonesia, sitting under the banana leaf huts, young people and old people, everyone all together, like families and locals but also anyone that is walking by, and they're all in there drinking coffee. There's coffee growing there, but they're not drinking this fancy stuff, it's all freeze dried crystals, like it's more about hot liquid and the smell, a simulation of coffee, more so than getting amped to go to work, but it's that too because everyone is poor and putting their backs into the fields. They're not drinking alcohol, it's always coffee and there's always a cloud of smoke lingering like a fog from all the hash the men smoke even though it's outside, and the conversations just flow. It's not primitive, it's very sophisticated, it felt like the quintessence of human sophistication, like witnessing the birth of culture, and I was there drinking the coffee and I couldn't speak the language but I was talking to these people with my eyes and through the tilt of our heads and with the coffee, sharing in that drink, and I kept thinking 'would these conversations even be happening if everyone wasn't full of coffee and hash?'

Narrator 1: Would this conversation be happening if we weren't drinking coffee? Ok, so if we're talking about how coffee changes or influences the human mind, transforms the thoughts or adjusts the amplitudes of consciousness, modulates its frequencies, then is it the coffee that's doing it neurologically, physiologically, energetically? Is the frequency in the chemical or botanical elements, or in how it effects the biology, or affects the psychology, or is it something external in that genesis of culture, in the exchange between parts? Is the coffee transmogrifying our thought frequencies or are we amplifying the frequencies of the plant sentience, perhaps, and how are those frequencies transmitted? The conversation itself could be said to have a signature frequency, and maybe it's just an allegory, a loose application of some hard science upon the soft permeable substrates of the body, but I don't think so, it doesn't have to be. It's about energy, it is energy, this kinetic transferal between resonant bodies, the build up of cerebral potentials, the tensioning of muscles and ligaments as the waves of inspiration chase out the ennui from the corpus, and it's also about sensitivity right? About an empathy which extends beyond the physical limits, waves of liminality, of sentience beyond the brain, a snapping of connections beyond our human neuralplasticity, an exchange along the gradient only coarsely separating our selves.... coarse, as due to lack of fidelity, a story of poor resolution. So maybe we can tune it differently, to get a clearer signal or maybe pick up some information that's being lost.

Narrator 2: Right, where does the conversation end and the inspiration begin? What is the difference between the idea and the speaker? It's like atoms, or you know, the atomic model, like from high school. We all studied these drawings, diagrams, models made of painted wood, with some red protons and yellow neutrons and a perfect circular orbit of the slightly smaller blue electron swirling around the nucleus, and were told that everything that exists, every thing is made up of some combination of this atoms, these clusters of little colored balls, and that it's all filled up, but really it's more like the opposite, that it's all empty, all colorless, that there's never really ever anything or any thing there at all, more like an infinite regression of forces and magnitudes constantly repelling us from touching, a vacuum collapsing upon its own vicissitudes, denying and defying our primitive primate mind from comprehending them at all. Ok, not to be dramatic, but the truth of matter is closer to an algorithmic probability than a physical model like that, a swirl of chaotic Brownian motion condensing into cloud form clusters of chance operations, not really so structured at all... the closer we look the less we see. I was reading this blurb the other day about the termination boundaries of galaxies, how everything is always falling into the center, all our planets falling into the dying star called Sun, and this cocktail of attraction becomes more diluted the farther out we go until the influence of gravity becomes negligible, but it doesn't stop abruptly, there's no clear line or barrier. It kind of tapers off, gradually, yeah like a gradient, a bad Photoshop gradient where you can see all the pixels - low fidelity, right? - but it's this transition from pink to green intended to be looked at from really far away. I dunno, maybe that's just human nature, or the human folly, or the blight of Empiricism, to always see two or a separation when things shouldn't be so clearly severed. Well, you see what I mean... so where does the idea end and the individual begin? Where do I end in this conversation, and where do you begin, and how do we describe the gradient, what is the signature of this frequency, and would any of this be contemplated if we weren't drinking coffee? Ok ok, but what would we be thinking instead? What would we be discussing if we were drinking green tea, or sarsaparilla, of shilajit, or sauerkraut juice? Is it about the intoxication or the influence or the intuition?

Narrator 1: Yeah but there's always the social influence too. We can story a new story to story a new reality, but there's always gonna be the overarching influence of the social story looming overhead, and that has to be grappled with. When I was growing up, like when I was 15-25 or so, I was drinking lots of coffee and I was taking lots of other drugs to, as many different things as I could and as much of them I could get my hands on, but it wasn't abuse, more like research. I remember feeling like I didn't choose this world and I didn't want to live in it, not the way it was. I always thought that the world as it stood was absurd, violent and painful and excessive, and I didn't want any part of it, so taking drugs and listening to weird fucked up noise and causing chaos was an exploration into other ways of thinking and feeling and talking and living. I felt free and it was the closest to nature I maybe ever was, but it was also destructive to my body, I mean yeah the chemicals, but mostly because it was seen as anti-social behavior, and it was. I wanted my life to be a big fat FUCK YOU to everyone and everything, or at least a firm NO. Now that I'm older I'm a little more... buoyant. I've been using that word lately. Not quite grounded, but not floating off into space either, just floating, rising and falling with the currents, carving out a territory between land masses for now, but it also feels like biding my time for something to come, whatever is gonna be next. I think about safety and security, mostly because there's people that depend on me, are attached to me, yeah and that I'm attached to as well, and pure chaos breaks apart all those connections, totally dismantles the self, splinters identity and ego, erases names, relaxes associations.... being untethered is pure freedom but also totally anti-social! And it threatens people! I want to live in that chaos, mostly, but I also want to relate, and coffee has opened up a time and a place to allow for those meetings to happen, even if it does make me feel more paranoid about what I'm gonna do for work and where I'm gonna live... all that bullshit that keeps me thrashing around in this undersized pool instead of letting loose down the rapids, but I want that sometimes. Security is staying within the norm, the known, the neural-typical, where everyone else is hanging out, and that's what culture is, right? You can invent languages by yourself all day but without anyone to speak with you're just a schizophrenic out for a walk in the jungle.

Narrator 3: I'm so jealous of you two, when I hear you speak and hear how free you are. I want to be like that, but I know that if I let go I could never be able to hold on again. I know time isn't real, or purely subjective, or just an algorithmic abstraction, but clocks are real and I don't get paid vacation! I have to work to stay alive and coffee gets me through the day, and I don't want to be a cog in the machine, but I can't just let everything go either.

Narrator 1: That's it though, it's a risk, it's dangerous, it's putting everything on the line, at rock bottom, at wits end, because there's nothing else to do, because there's nothing else to lose, and nothing to gain either. Maybe it's not so much about getting to the end, but seeing through back to the beginning, or maybe dissolving all the limitations between things so it can just propel around infinitely, getting faster and more clear at every pass until there's no more up or down. But yeah, ya gotta eat! We gotta live! Can't just go untethered and pretend to find happiness, no one can live alone! Damn, this is where I get really fucked up. I mean, we're always living within these stories, building these mythologies, but it's not like poverty is just a myth, or that the oppression of people of color in America is a fiction that we are all guilty of perpetuating. The oppression is real! To deny it is to perpetuate the violence! But I'm not trying to stir up a conversation about privilege or politics, or identity or economy or authenticity, or all the residue of media spectacle and arbitrary truths that go along with it. Not that it's not worth discussing, or that we won't eventually, but for now it seems more important - as a matter of life over death! - to focus upon the scale itself, that micro-macro oscillation of perspective, of the story! Right? The story we tell sets the scale for the scene, sets the events in motion, sets limits upon the details that can be included and implies the biases and limitations of the storyteller. Everything is fair game, but one thing at a time, and where is it headed anyways? I love coffee, I fucking love coffee, but I don't love everything that it connotes and I don't want to bathe in all the psychic residues it carries along with it. This thick oily botanical tea is stirring the syrups of my mind like a delicate dance, an exchange, a symbiotic twirl of the proverbial hips, and I want to influence as much as be influenced by its magical effects. Yes, magic motherfuckers, it's just poetry in action, the theatrical made real, that thing that all afficianados of transcendence and consilience are describing through various dialects of incantation, the Rosicrucians and the Alchemists and Posthuman cyborgs alike. Call it by any other name, but never just just.

Narrator 2: Ugh, I'm starting to twitch from all the caffeine. I'm gonna go on a run.

Narrator 3: Yeah I gotta get ready for work at the cafe.

Narrator 1: Goddamn clocks and calculators. Time does not exist. See you guys later.