Source Material

Pain–has an Element of Blank–
It cannot recollect
When it begun–Or if there were
A time when it was not–
It has no Future–but itself–
It’s Infinite contain
It’s Past–enlightened to perceive
New Periods–Of Pain.
-Emily Dickinson

-aposiopesis here, here, and here.

Yep back with more about pain & death. Why am I so eager to go there? So juicy, baby. So juicy.

Musical sources:
Forget Me Nots - Patrice Rushen
Dancing Barefoot - Patti Smith
Push Upstairs - Underworld
There, There - Radiohead
Extraordinary - Liz Phair
Christmas Day- Jim White
When You Give Your Love To Me - Kevin Gilbert
In My Time of Dying - John Mellencamp
In the Pines - Nirvana
Something in the Way - Nirvana

While I'm on the subject of Nirvana. God I wish I could write like Kurt Cobain sings In the Pines, or Glenn Gould plays the Goldberg Variations (1981 video of Gould playing GV here) or Roland Kirk plays the flute and nose flute on One Ton (Volunteered Slavery), the way Nina Simone sings Do I Move You? You get the idea. The aim is to write with an extreme violence. To write performatively (literary devices are simply cues on how to alter the breath), to provide actors with a blueprint for performance. How to contain the words on the page? No answers- only things to point at to confirm it is possible. A few sign-posts:

in Japan, there have been collectives of actors who have been using their bodies and voices in very specialized ways to perform in distinct ways for hundreds of years through such forms as Noh and kabuki. Throughout history, watching these people perform and vocalize has been a valid form of entertainment. This led to a relationship between the language and our perception of the relationship between the words being spoken and the movement of the body that made it difficult to separate them into just “literary” and “performance.” - Tadashi Suzuki, Donald Keene Center, Columbia University, 2002

writing, the letter, the sensible inscription, has always been considered by Western tradition as the body and the matter external to the spirit, to breath, to speech, and to the logos. And the problem of soul and body is no doubt derived from the problem of writing from which it seems – conversely – to borrow its metaphors - Jacques Derrida

We must pursue further how the channel of the actor’s body influences the nature and rigor of the dramatic text that passes through it. There are really two questions here: the first pertains to the actor’s influence on the composition of the dramatic text – in a word, how the dramatist composes, as we say, for the actor as the inevitable carrier of his text; the second pertains to what the actor’s presence does to the text as it passes through him, transcending textuality and becoming a theatrical representation. - Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms