“One of the most remarkable features of A Midsummer Night's Dream is that at the end members of the audience are unsure whether what they have seen is real, or whether they have woken up after having shared the same dream. This is of course precisely what Shakespeare wants to make clear, namely that the theatre is nothing more than a shared dream.”
Today you come to construct an author who is simply viewing pages on the internet; an author stuck between those broken pages; a voice fragmented by selfishness.
Or, I, lead you onward towards another woven strand of words while wishing you well in search of the performer, the I, or the screamer under your nose.
Please confiscate that wasted breath and breathe it back to say: if you like, if you will, this relationship can be more than textual. Here is what it can be....
A man sits in a chair and writes on his blog, “I’ve locked myself inside for too long trying to sketch something worthwhile, but....”
He stops.
“All day I observed the scene outside my bedroom window, looking out to nowhere.”
He glances to the window.
“I still have not yet settled on a perfect sketch; my mind wanders too often.”
He sits a moment then writes, “I do nothing. I sit. Now I write, ‘All morning I watched for movement outside this window.’”
A gull swooping down from the sky flashes in and out of his sight.
“I’ve nothing. There is nothing.”
He turns again. He sees the beating wings of the gull. The grey feathered body rises. He looks back onto the windowpane and sees his reflection. He writes, “No directions, no solace, nothing anywhere on the outside,” and the gull hovers in the distance; squawking. He stops to hear. Then he thinks about something someone had said and follows the link, to read this.
“I can’t allow anything inside my room to distract me. I can’t have other people in here. And I’m going to stay inside until it is done.”
He looks over the floor of his bedroom.
“‘Until I know that every brush stroke I’ve taken isn’t mangled by some other influence I will stay here,’ I had said before. But still there are too many intrusions. Look at how dirty this room is. What am I doing? The table is littered with books and magazines,” and below him a naked canvas sits among a scattered pile of paint supplies.
“And still I feel I need to paint something new.”
He sees the canvas with part of a sketch completed.
“That one I’d begun this morning.”
The sketch is of a portion of a blurred face with an eye looking outwards and a mouth set agape, and he knows that, “It was supposed to be a picture as though someone was peaking around a corner to find their own face looking back at them, a sort of frightened glimpse of your own ugly certainty in the moment you meet yourself. A moment of realization: you aren’t so simply you ... aren’t you?”
He smiles. He cannot keep himself occupied with this thought and flips to another webpage. He reads this.
“That hint was too fragile though. So now the trick is in the eye; a little something in the flicker of the eye,” and looking over the incomplete face, inspecting the figure inside the eye; he frowns. He turns towards the long mirror hung from his bedroom door. His reflection is defeating. He looks back to the sketch, and then writes, “And there it is: a self portrait being confronted with the self.”
He sees a glimmer of someone familiar inside that eye: a knowing face. The painting looks out onto an unknowable audience; looks horrified, and, “It’s as though the face is trapped by all that has been revealed; and he can’t escape.”
He stares into the mirror.
“I can’t escape.”
He turns back and forth, fidgeting, and then looks at his watch. He should just read. That is easier. He reads the blogs he’s becoming familiar with, viewing some words on performatism, and yet still there cannot be anything, or essentially anyone.
And, what: I?
“But the shock should be real. And there it is isn’t it? It’s too obscure.”
But what? he thinks, and, “When the audience comes upon that face, what will they find in this surprise, and what really is the point?”
He sees the other self portraits scattered around his room, piled in corners, on his bed and on the floor, stacked underneath the window, and knows, “Now there is no use in trying,” and so, “Maybe later I’ll begin.”
He looks at the art of flesh, the nudes by the photographer Petter Hegre, the pictures of women with pale contoured curves sloping jubilantly, the peering eyes that bring him forward into the real, the false reality of forms. He sees each portrait looking back from gleaming eyes, their faces rapt in obliviousness and demented perplexity, and he cannot escape their attention to his movements, his hand scribbling messages to them to inform his future self of its failing continuity .
“I believe them now as I really see them here in front of me. They all have this beautiful familiarity about them. And I believe in what is apparent. I believe in these characters even though I can’t have composed any one of them. But I believe them to appear. It’s just that....”
He stops writing and sets his notes aside. He picks up a pad of paper, sets it in front of him and takes up a fist full of pencils. Looking over into the mirror, he waits. Then, from nothing, he begins automatically. He scratches the blank page of paper with a fist of pencils as he focuses on the many scattered lines in front of him. Then he stops and tears the page away. He begins again, drawing freely.
He works for an hour but gives up, crumpling the page into a ball and chucking it across the room. He takes his notes and writes, “What for? All this time has been wasted. All their foolish expressions staring at me every moment and everything wasted.”
He shakes his head.
“But I thought this had been a productive morning,” and then he stops again; returning only to add, “I must give up.”
He goes to his bed and tries to sleep by saying the mantra, “A work will be done,” over and over again until he dreams of an infinite galaxy painted above him; and there is the constellation of Rhei: a mangled figure emblazoned by dancing stars and arrows shot towards his empty head. Then, flashing forward, he enters a room to hang this portrait on the wall. The audience is awed; except a heckler from the back shouts something loudly. He cannot hear the words, but he knows it to be criticism. He knows because everyone begins to look and see the flaws running through every line. He knows those flaws. He has seen the flaws all the time he had painted.
He shouts.
Then he awake in bed; the mirror is in his view. His face is level so that something stares back. He rises and goes to his desk, and with his hands shaking slightly, he writes, “Again. Again. And again; my body feels detached. I can’t shake off the idea of giving up. I think I need to restart. But I’m seized with the thought of not knowing. And the reality is that I have become a caricature in reality.”
He sees a portrait on the edge of the table.
“And the man who wrote that, who wrote that, who wrote that, and that. Who said I could draw my face? I can’t. I’ve tried,” and he shakes his head and stretches his arms.
“I think I’m too tired.”
He goes back to his bed and sleeps blankly until evening when he wakes to write, “Once more I’ve begun writing for the moment. I hope to clear away all that from before,” and then he looks to the square patch of evening light that is cast through the window onto his floor. The light fades away from his view. Then he looks to the windowpane, and, “I’ll paint my reflection,” he writes; his face staring out from a shimmer against the glass.
“I think this would be ... if I capture this.”
Slowly the darkness eats away at his figure, the blood of a sunset disappearing from the horizon; and, as his face disappears, he laughs, because, “Everything is meant to leave me here to finish my work.”
Outside the window a streetlight turns on and suddenly glares inside his room with an inspecting eye, the tree limbs and the layers of fat houses outside contorting in the pale light.
“Maybe this I can paint: those fading shadows in the background against the siding of this house now flooded in the dull streetlight.”
He smiles, and, “‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I can encapsulate everything outside me,’” and laughs again. And, “‘Laugh,’ I thought. ‘I should laugh more often.’”
And then, “‘because I can’t cope with one more portrait,’” he laughs.
“‘I don’t need these portraits anymore,’ I thought. ‘None of these selves anymore; I can’t find them as myself,’” and he adds, “He can see out on how the world is without me here and that’s worth laughing about I suppose,” then looks away.
“‘If everything is without me,’” he writes, “‘I can still have the world.’” But he stops for a moment and gets up. He walks around the room, looking at each sketch and each painting. He stops at the window and stares for a moment and then he goes back to the table and writes: “At times I am there above this man and he is simply another person. He is the wrong word for what is apparent; and that word is writing nothing into a fiction but a character speaking, saying, ‘And he feeds me definitions, but I cannot exist by those word.’”
He begins and stops and begins and stops again, and finally writes, “These words,” and continues, “tasting of deadened powder like an ash of something; like an ashen taste that had been moments ago alive with flavour,” and his words are burnt away by a flicker of a street light that peers in at him, and the moment is lost, and his words are in ruin before they have had time to empty from his stale mouth. So he rises to get a drink and, when he returns, he writes, “For that instance when the taste of water reached me, I had returned. Then he said, ‘That one who feeds me these reasons,’ and I thought I was him.” He continues, “‘Thank you for feeding me with this,’ he said. And yet I was sitting above writing that into this foolish thing.” He writes, “He writes, ‘And he writes because I became nothing then but his words.’”
“So I am here now and now and now and yet I still know someone is behind this all: a figure above me, writing me into existence; a figure scratching me this moment into the page,” and he stops, “‘But then someone rips him away from the page and he begins anew.’”
He writes, “‘And that is it. He brings more and more of these thoughts to provoke me.’”
He studies the last thing he has written.
“Now I’ve just had a realization. All the past written here is imperfect somehow. This old self is out of place, out of character, out of frame, out of a real connection with me.”
He stops to listen to the sound of his voice as he writes, “And how can I keep going on about how out of measure he becomes in describing that past self you talk about as ‘this jarring, unreal contraption of human being broken into this reality of existing here with these caricatures surrounding me in my room.’ Well?”
He responds, “‘Maybe one day I will hint here and there that this certainly could be me or if you’d like or if you need or if you want this, this character, or maybe I’ll let you have him for all he’s worth, free of charge, because he is nothing but your fiction.’”
He writes, “He writes, ‘Because he couldn’t know. He could only create me. And then he couldn’t even let the painting last by the final strokes he himself sets down.’ But I know he purposely acts against me.”
He settles back into his mind, and begins writing, “And writes, ‘Now, of course, before once again being reborn in the words, he sits in contemplation of his next meaningful creation, feeling around inside his mind for the next logical route of integration within this fictitious world he has made. He needs to level the past by the weight of his presence.’”
He then laughs about this thought. His self reflection forces him to say out loud, “You are a fool, enjoying your foolishness,” and stops.
“Well, OK, now you are, ‘broken by doubt,’ as you say.”
He shakes his head.
“But I should paint.”
He thinks to that future self he will draw after this: a sketch of a face. He veers his thinking towards himself and into past selves he once had been. He tries to see but there are only flashes of those forms in his memory that seem false and true. Then he hears the whimsical sounds of whistles and horns accompanied by the thud of a beating drum. A street carnival is outside his window and at the door, people are knocking loudly, yelling, “Come outside!”
Then, breaking in to take him away, a mob of ten or more, yell, “Come on!”
He is driven into the madness of the crowded street filled with musicians and dancers, the anarchy and mayhem adsorbing him as he is carried along by voices screaming into his ears, and he struggles to escape and be alone again, but he cannot help but be taken in by the celebration.
He tries to yell, but his doubts are mixed into the group of clowns who playfully shrug away his wild expression, their absurd smiles making him also smile; and now he is lost inside the crowd, he cannot find those he knows and does not need them any longer because everyone carries him forward. He is carried by the crowd. He moves along with the cacophony of faces surrounding him.
When eventually he does find one other he knows, his greeting is caught within the sounds of the celebration, and the other fades into the crowd without hearing him. He pauses to reflect, but he is able only to focus on the facial reactions he receives from the crowd behind him pushing him further forward. They will not allow him to pause, and force him forward with many hands shoving him. He can hear only the rhythm of the speech about him. He cannot think anymore, and so he gives up. He embraces the flowing crowd, the multitude of characters sweeping down the street, and feels himself becoming tranquil in this mayhem. He finds himself spending the rest of the night wandering amongst a carnival until early in the morning, he says to himself, “I’m made!”
He speaks firmly, yelling into the crowd, “I have to leave!”
Running away, he knows, he knows how to take the starting dab for his next self portrait. He runs laughing hysterically, manoeuvring through the crowd. He feels his heart beat begin the rhythm of his work while behind him the crowd of elusive faces crash in his mind like cymbals resonating in a chamber. He runs up his street to his apartment and, in his room, he locks the door and stands there a moment listing to the reverberations. Then sitting down to the table, he draws to that rhythm of the carnival. With shapes conjoined from mind to hand, he searches like a blind man seeking another person by the presence of flesh under his searching finger tips. He hears the melody of shouting voices in a chaotic symphony as he comes closer and closer to that riotous mass of people inside himself. Then he hears a single voice, saying, “A man sits in a chair and writes, ‘I sit inside my room watching out my bedroom window. I hear squawking. It says: I am here, I am here, I am here.”
The gull has returned.
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Jared Bland, known for getting and leaving important positions in Canadian
culture, is out at M&S, but this time for a health reason, while former
literary...
1 year ago
