Last Days of a Great City

Elevated Noon: A Nanoplay

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Characters:

      Marshall Phil Kane
      Deputy Marshal Dario Pell

Deputy Pell: Gonzalez and his men will be here any minute, Marshall.  [The bell in the church tower tolls once.]  What are you aimin’ to do?

Marshall Kane:  The stakes are heavy, Pell, you know that, as light as one might try to make them seem.  [The bell tolls a second time.]

Deputy Pell:  He’s a killer, Marshall, one of the best shots in the Territories, an’ he’s got an old score to settle.

Marshall Kane:  Yeah, well I figger he won’t be expecting a gun barrel-full of satire and other literary techniques.  [The bell tolls a third time.]  It’s Horatian that got him convicted, it’ll be Juvenalian puts him away once and for all …

They Do It With Mirrors

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Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

                    Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Or to put it metaphorically: the bracketed matter is not wiped off the phenomenological slate, but only bracketed, and thereby provided with a sign that indicates the bracketing.  Taking its sign with it, the bracketed matter is reintegrated in the main theme of the inquiry.

                   Edmund Husserl, Ideas

Dialogue Concerning Samuel Beckett and Snakes on a Plane

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I’m sitting with Raul (another gay philosopher) on my front porch, and we’re celebrating the Samuel Beckett centenary by exchanging silences.  We had been discussing the second act of Beckett’s Happy Days, in which Winnie, a middle-aged woman is buried to her neck in a mound of dirt.  Raul reminded me of Not I, where the stage is in total darkness except for the character Mouth, “about eight feet above stage level, faintly lit from close-up and below, rest of face in shadow”:

“Winnie has an obsession with her gewgaws, but she can’t manipulate them.  Mouth is worse off.  She has a shattered consciousness that she tries to reintegrate without the assistance of her own corporeality,” says Raul.

“I'm totally into your corporeality …”

He ignores me.  “She’s just a mouth floating in the void.”

“You’re saying that Beckett turned the stage into some ghoulish specimen jar.”

“No, just the opposite.  The fact that the characters are constrained makes their struggles more poignant.”  Raul pauses to dab a tear with the corner of his Kleenex.  He’s getting agitated.  “Popular media go the other way.  It’s all about the possibilities inherent in excess, not constraint.”

“Endless, inane chatter; quick-cutting of images; ever bigger explosions—”

“Right, but we can't sustain that.  I think the Blogosphere’s overwhelming response to Snakes on a Plane signals a newfound regard for constraint in art.”

“As in the constraints on the agency of the creatures that would terrorize the passengers?  Is that what you mean?  Like, where are the snakes going to hide—the beverage cart?”

“Yeah, like Samuel Jackson yelling into his radio, ‘We got motherfuckin’ snakes!’”

Ambience

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For a time advertising tried to sound like the voice of authority.  Then it became, simply, a loud voice.  Soon it will be no voice.  Ambience.  No more intrusive than the air you breathe.  Ambience.