Don't get out much

Doing all one's work online can lead one to do strange things, such as sit on the sandy floor of an attic-like bookstore, near people who smell like their dogs sit on way too many of their clothes, to watch some one-act plays, the final one being Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. I had forgotten that I was a character in a Beckett play. Any of his plays. Back in New York, I remember seeing the Public Theater’s production of Happy Days, in which a woman named Winnie rooted around in her purse for things, while sitting on top of a garbage heap. After that, the man I was seeing at the time aptly referred to my purse as my "Winnie Bag." In this play, Krapp first deals with his filing system and has some things fall of his desk. That is a day in my life. Then he listens to a tape of himself talking on his 39th birthday. While I do not have tapes, I have my diaries, and while I have not made a ritual of retrieving them, I know they are there, awaiting me. In fact, just today I had an idea about a story culled from the letters a beach bum I met in California when I was eighteen wrote me for a while. {Funny that I think first of taking someone else's words. But I am curious as I try to remember what on earth that drifter had to say in so many letters.} I realize I have reached the point where the accumulation need not continue. Now is the time to shape the material into something. But I feel dread, like Krapp, who felt disgust at listening to his younger self, yet then proceeded to speak again into the tape recorder. He is so pitiful and so typical. One doesn’t want to just pronounce alone in one’s room. One must record: imagine a listener (the listeners he actually has, because he is a character in a play; the listeners we don’t have, but imagine because we write). I blog, therefore I am! The imaginary listener gives some meaning to the meaninglessness: the confrontation with one’s washed up dreams of grandeur.

I don't even know who the actor was, but he was good. The performance was free, and very low budget, but that in no way matters to a Beckett play. As far as I know, this was it: the whole performance. All the work, all that talent, for a room of about forty people, to see once.

It kind of reminds me of last weekend. We went to a party up in the Live Free or Die state. "Pyroman" provided the fireworks. He spent the entire day setting them up. The introduction began before dark. He stood on the platform he had built, in a vinyl, boxy like costume. He began dancing in a robotic fashion to “Relax, Don’t Do it” playing on a boom box. (Interestingly, a search for that song title turns up the lyrics on “One Hit Wonders.” It’s kind of a theme here.) . Fireworks shot forth from his arms. He was a living fireworks display! He turned around, and his back presented a spiral item that spun and spewed white light. He stepped back and forth, no major dance moves, but it was clear that he was in bliss: dancing in the showers of sparks. When you thought he was done, two big blasts of fire and smoke that went up behind him, like the ones that appeared before the Wizard of Oz. What a delight to see an artist at work, focused and rejoicing in his creation, temporary though it may be.