Gold is fleeting, gold is fickle, gold is fun!

There is gold across the river but I don’t want none

I would rather be dry than held up by a golden gun

saying Work more, earn more, live more, have more fun!

-Laura Marling-

 

In a few short hops, the squirrel would have made it to the little paper scrap flapping out of the sidewalk crack, but since she was already holding between her teeth a chunk of bread twice the mass of her body, she had a moment of existential crisis. Comfort or Curiosity? Nourishment or Knowledge? Provisions or Poetry? As it happened, the point was made moot in a moment of unruly scramble:

Two pairs of feet went rushing toward the squirrel, as their passengers yelled “Get the bread! Get the bread!” Reacting instinctively like a bat out of hell, the squirrel-plus-loaf almost ran smack into a crude pair of skinny tires belonging to an even cruder cyclist who yelled, “Outta the road, squirrel! Goddam rodent scum! Fucknuts!”

Calming her nerves with bread, the squirrel watched in relief from the shelter of a curbside bush, as the little paper scrap was discovered and read by a rotund man in a very thick tweed-suit-and-overcoat ensemble.

The man stood still a moment, reading the aforementioned scrap of brilliance. He let the paper rest its weightlessness in his hands as his eyes made a full circle around their quarters; then, with an invisible shrug, he put the paper in his pocket and whistled in his stroll past the theatre department down to the math hall where Real Men were made.

He did not, nor did the squirrel for that matter, have any reason to imagine that a young student inside that theatre building would have found (had he found it) that lyric delightful and poignant, simple and direct. Both squirrel and man had plenty business of their own without worrying over whether or not some young lad who would highly value Marling’s poetry was currently plotting an act of insurrectionary art.

Indeed, said art student was deep in the laboratory of cultural examination, learning an exact alchemy of art and science. Harmless compounds that would turn to colorful cloud bursts when mixed with the sulfuric gasses of a human being’s digestive waste. Harmful compounds that would detonate upon impact with air, bone, or a ten-foot wall of thickly-stacked twenty dollar bills. Careful formulas of ultra-diluted, odorless pepper spray that could be piped into a room slowly but surely, causing tears and nausea so mild as to be thought emotive.

The idea was nebulous, but then so was Jove’s sense of self at the time. Since his liberation into the fermentation garden that was NYU, he had laid himself and everything he had known upon the chopping block. Everything he had always known to be real was real—which alone was terrifying—but so, too, was everything he wanted to be certain was not. His work was both a breaking down and a knitting together. This production fed him as it fed upon him. Everything was going in, and whether he ended up with Sangria or Cyanide was none of his concern [1]. When he went into this cave, all the hieroglyphs were moving, enraptured and enraged, into philharmonic action. Everything was on the table. There was nothing to hold back and nothing to hide, though Jove always did his work in the dark recesses of his allotted personal Theatre Department cube. He was extremely well-hidden as modern cave-dwellers go, insulated by blaring jazz, binging on a particularly well-crafted mix of licorice tea and deprivation.

In this way, before the first Harvest Moon, he was able to come up with the bones, or rather the spinal cord and tadpole tail, of his production. By “his production,” it is appropriate to infer that he—yes, even as a mere sophomore—had showed his chops in such a manner as to be selected winner of the Theatre Department’s yearly contest, the College Heavyweight Arts Intensive, in which individual artists were challenged to give eighteen shows in eighteen days, in honor of Chai, the numerological basis of the Hebrew word for “Life” and yeah, Theatre Nerds are that thorough. The CHAI this year had as its grand prize, in addition to a year’s supply of a certain warm beverage, the chance to write and direct a theatrical production that would premiere during the Vice Presidential address, given in the first months after Inauguration. NYU was well-funded and well-connected, and the Theatre Department had a special sort of pull with the Board [2], so every four years the VPOTUS was signed up to give a motivational address to the Hardworking Inspired Student Body of this Outstanding Institution [3]. This year happened to be Inauguration year, so, to many theatre students, performing at the VP address was akin to tea time with the Pope. So Jove had done a right jolly good job in the esteemed CHAI contest. He had worked his garbage-can-playing, body-painting, glitter-spewing, gender-questioning, young gifted ass off. And he had won all the marbles, at the ripe age of 20.

If he’d had a father who would have slapped him heartily on the back for an artistic feat of wonderment, he’d have been slapped on the back for this one. But Jove had, it was crystal clear to him, a father that would be shocked and chagrined by the creative assembly of his son’s artful vendetta. [4]

Although the project was still quite embryonic, we can get a glimpse of its form.

So far, the spinal cord and tadpole tale would appear like this, with enough sonic waves bounced off of them:

Explosion.

Begins the scene and catches the attention. Erupts into wondrous spiral dancers with dinosaur bones who eventually melt into the ground. (Two levels used simultaneously or singly, connected by spiral stairs and a firefighter’s pole. And a stripper’s pole.)

Scene 1 with Board Room and Belly Dancers. Very psychotically-early-60s entertainment vibe, real decisions being made. Strangely off-putting, doomful, but rife with colorful delight.

Belly Dancers remain, become jingling stars. Sky is falling. Kids with telescopes. “Jimmy’s Day at Camp” feeling. Earth opens up, children leap into it with glee and abandon. Fire. Hidden.

Shadow screen, dancers behind. Red. Fast. Feels thick. Wheat grows up from this. Second story ground. Slowly: bugs.

Tiny spiky insects. Eating away chunks in wheat, tearing off each other’s legs, piling them in the middle with the wheat shards, burning the pile with last arms left (use red crinoline for this fire, yellow for slow glow, sink through to lower stage, unleash dancers.)

Dancers below & above; fire & aerial. By this time, the crowd is at a delightful Cirque de Luna, captivated and dazzled, sparkley-eyed. Play with them.

Lights down, fire dancers swirl round, igniting slowly walls of candles. Hundreds of candles. Thousands. Candles handed out in the rows. Candles across the balcony. Candles in the scaffolding. (Get fire marshall signed off on this.) (Give cash if necessary.)

Jove. Spiral-eyed child, crackpot journalist and insurgent dreamer, mouthpiece of the clarinet. He had had enough enough times to cause a runaway train to derail on his neurons. But his body had not won the battle with his mind, partly because they were secretly in love and didn’t want to disappoint the Planning Committee by coming out in unity. They had work to do. Hard work. There was a war on, for Chrissake!

Thus, his brain was hard at work sparking The Change, his body surrounded with the Bunson burners of redemption. Everything in the way of understanding is a product of this culture, he was scribbling in a journal on his right while scooping a pile of metallic powder on his left. (He left out the part about how every product of the culture was a way of understanding, but one can suppose it is implied by the rule of opposites. Or the Theory of Relativity. Or something. [5])

Holy cross. Bugle player. Mountain rancher sunset. Something equally manipulative, flags or bunnies. Heartbreakingly beautiful. Must cause tears. Must. (Gas available.) Film reel of home movies spliced in with babies, birds, and detonations. Flowered vines, soaring kites, smog, detonations. Kissing fools, dancing cranes, running water, detonations. Hand jives, hand tools, hand shakes, hand jobs, detonations. Keep it going way past comfort. Slow, sad curtain with silk-spinning dancers drawing them closed mid-air.

No intermission. Leave people holding their candles for a full minute. Keep the aerial dancers spinning slightly off-stage. Then open curtains: candles gone. Brick building in place. No light. All light in audience. One (implanted) audience member get up and check out building dimensions with candle. One (implanted) usher follow and assess the situation. Two lights on stage. Tension of possible conflict, but candle meets flashlight. Begin to dance.

Meanwhile… Cash stacked inside. Chains discovered upon the building. Chain dance. All dancers back, but hidden and locked up on second floor. In chains. Movements wrong, maddened, menaced, crazed. Anxiety. Nausea. Awful. Loud fearsome music. Over the top.

Walls sink. Dinosaur bones stand in their place, house skeleton.

Christmas tree cash tower. Money stacked. Examined. Stage lights very important now. Music has lots of space, silence, stretches of shadow.

Every few minutes he would stretch out his long legs, crank up his Nat King Cole or Prince or Copeland or what have you, kick across the room, and tail-spin back. This would not only wake him up and remind him of his holysacred heart, but it would give the lonely strips of skin paving the deserted psoas highway a chance to feel again, if only to feel the inside of his pant legs. Then, well-acquainted with gravity, he would land dutifully back into his spinny stool and crank the machine of the brain until the next wave of embodied movement.

The kid was very efficient. In this manner, he could work all night, sleep for one R.E.M. cycle after the sun rose, if necessary, and bust his ass for class all day. Most of the time, instead of sleeping, he would just climb to the roof and watch the sunrise with a teacup in one hand and the latest music-playing marvel in the other. [6]

More to stage that are “in audience” or “on crew” or “hospitality.” Two more scenes, please. Make them count: pull attention to the edges and wings. Keep anxiety in place, right in the middle, but divert and deny enough to cause resignation, to cause a preference for distraction, a surrender to the authority of the Stage.

Lull to sleep, then rip open with Explosion. Big one. Money burn and fly. Security guards in. VPrez will be contained, but one dancer will brave being tazed in order to deliver goods. Make dramatic citizen’s arrest in the name of tax evasion, embezzlement, fraud, and war crimes. (Guns not necessary, but back-up options available.) When people get a grip, it is done. Allow them to consider, compute, and clap wildly. It is theatre. It is real. It is done.

To Do: Contact hackers and puppets to completely deplete the Federal Reserve. For Real. (Call Jarrod.) Finish Revolution. Enter Exquisite Redemption.

This scrawled impressionism was not yet any real living being of Jove’s conception, although it indeed was being given its life. The above was merely, as stated, the ultrasound. While the ultra-sonic depiction of reality that language provides is fascinating enough, it is certainly no Venus de Milo, no L’Eternel Printemps, no homemade YouTube classic [7]. It is a cool photobooth reel, live enough to cause excitement, fuzzy enough to cause confusion. Words, Jove reminded himself, could not grasp what his endless toil was actually producing in that basement.

Many rooftop mornings, after his Liquid Licorice-n-Sunlight breakfast, he would read the following passage by Rainer Maria Rilke, squinting needlessly against his memory’s boast into the crumpled font peppered over the long, thin ribbon of wood pulp. He felt like a treasure hunter. He felt like Banksy in a Guy Fawkes mask. He felt like a Lady of Marie Antoinette’s court. He felt like his heart was beating:

Dear Sir,

Your letter arrived just a few days ago. I want to thank you for the great confidence you have placed in me. That is all I can do. I cannot discuss your verses; for any attempt at criticism would be foreign to me. Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism; they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren’t all so tangible and sayble as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

–Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet”

 

-**

1. Well, as we will see, the latter was very much indeed of his concern. Was I not supposed to say that?
2. Yes, what you heard is true, they are sleeping together.
3. HIS BOI…? Surely leading to future headlines: Vice Potus Hollers at His Boi!
4. That fact was indeed part of the inspiration for this piece.
5. He was no Physicist, to everyone’s surprise.
6. As was common with many of his peers, Jove’s marvel was smaller than a postage stamp and his teacup was bigger than a breadbox.
7. Respect, Sweet Brown.