The Esoteric Drama Club 1

In the New School building it is time for Drama class...

The New School is a large white building with many annexes and blocks of stone scattered about.

Some people see it is a sinister minimalist building, most see it in a practical way, as purely functional, with its white-washed walls and its hospital windows filled with secretive blinds and darkness. M, the student, has after climbing barricades gained entrance to the ground floor, feeling as if he has disturbed a tomb, or an ancient megalith, with all the corridors and stairwells dark and stuffy... He gains access to a long corridor inside, which reminds him, strangely, of a youth centre he attended long ago, all brown counters and dripping taps in cluttered, long-abandoned classrooms. He reaches a long flight of white-painted stairs which are the ghostly, skeletal type of school stairs with steel bannisters. He climbs them slowly and carefully, thrilling to his secrets. He is compelled to attend the Esoteric Drama class high in the building, but its the favourite of his subjects. As he climbs the weary, rickety stairs higher and higher (ascending, it seems to him, farther than he ought to) the walls around him brighten, evidence of a festive attitude begins to appear, there are red lightbulbs and grinning masks, the darkest corners have been brightened and all the cobwebs swept away. He sees another participant arrive, a tall, thin individual covered in a sheet and wearing a huge papier-mache head with bulging eyes and a red, sharptongue mouth, gliding up the stairs, bustling with excitement.

Weeds

Up the sickly green hill the kid wandered... From the shallow bottom of the housing estate, greyish below him, a pit of old streets, lamp-posts, secret addicts in backyards. In the windblown, fresh morning he had ascended the hill, pale-faced. He was a large-skulled kid with a sorrowful expression on his face, long fingers, and was carrying a bunch of bright yellow daffodils, for no reason, nonchalantly. He seemed anaemic, insipid, frightened, yet oddly beautiful in his thinness. He walked gradually up the gravelly path, over the green smooth hump of the hill, round and swelling above the pitiful rain-smoky town. A picturesque panorama on Saturday morning in spring, just awaken from electronic bedrooms.

As he reaches the top of the hill, painful-eyed, he stops short as a hugely powerful, windy voice bellows out at him. "Ha, and are the Aliens after you?" The boy stops and he knows that the aliens are indeed after him, bug-eyed grey Aliens, strangely intelligent, full of sinister mirth, with theirs shining black eyes and in their polished saucers, always reaching for him with hollow fingers. Yet he responds simply, caressing his daffodils: "Yes, and the weeds too".

For he knows that in his wake, all along the length of the slow path he has ascended, have sprouted an undergrowth of pale-green weeds that even now rustle in the wind, that wave like living fronds of seaweed in the path. They follow him faithfully where he walks, sprout with the enthusiasm of a dog bounding behind him. They are lustrous, honest, hardy weeds, too sorrowful, too embedded in earth, to ever be plucked out.

conversation friday night

"What I need to do really is go to sleep at night, but I slept most of the day, like a fool, dreaming Nietzschean syllogisms." "And they are?"

"Well I was thinking about a quote I read, "what is possible is natural". But if you think about it, a lot of things are possible, murder, rape, cannibalism, genocide are possible, but are they natural?"

"Well, plastic surgery is for sure not natural" "Well, good point, but it is possible. Anyway, that's what my dreams were full of, Nietzschean riddles about possibility and nature. I woke up, it was sunset, six o clock.

... One is forced to the conclusion, after all, that all of the above is natural, and that even the end of the world, being possible, is natural. It's the only conclusion.

So do not fear the end of the world my friend, embrace it like a lover, knowing how inevitable it is, how sound and right".

"You really got me thinking". "Good."

Ghost 9

Watching the trees wave- pools of liquid

Under the earth. Talking about the angel with the poor boy.

A circle storm rages in the lake.

By its side I cannot force myself to even dream.

Light- inhabiting poolsides- in my mouth.

The next dream knifed in- habit

Made me disown it.

The dream was magenta, close-knit

Of knives and teeth. Something hairless, bold-

A thing such as I had never dreamed before.

Ghost 8

Give me softly back old sorrows

Snatched from jaws of death.

Permit me to remember

Excuses, drear days of sixteen,

Banks, burns, and braes, afternoon bridges,

The warm girl at my side.

Let me see again, darkly, her grins and words,

Melting gently in the autumn air,

Curses in November to make me crave comfort

In lamplit halls, in yellow wallpaper,

When I snapped off the light and sunk into dreams,

Empty-handed, never knowing.

Let me kiss the phantom of old times,

Survey again cracked classrooms, empty chairs,

Where once, in joyless afternoons, we sat,

Only to leave for blue moons set outside

Penniless in the rigid sky.

I'll tear the teeth of death to win back to that sight!

I'll swear against time's armies, i'll submit

To any loss of sanity or will,

To feel again, the kiss of old fate,

The smell of perfume ever dear to me.

To touch again, the soft, betraying flesh,

And speak with life to life upset,

Before the arc of time all falls away,

And leaves me with a broken plate.

My words resound,

And echo back from empty walls.

The sound of stone on stone,

Of dust whispering to dust.

Ghost 7

The awkward banks of time...

I had left myself almost open to the old comicbooks,

The starlit nights when I was whole and youth was fair,

Ageless records that haunt me yet, remembrance.

Soft girl, hair midnight black, with lips lisping, roaming

Abroad, the broken autumn railway.

Evenings when I peered at the sky.

The old yellow bed, fat and sumptuous, creaking,

Me awkwardly exposed in bedsocks to life,

Skies outside, lamplight, all acknowledged earnestly,

But incompletely. Yet skectchpads of time,

Hopeless even now, unremembered, un-sought after,

Forgotten like the calendars of ancient days.

Days! When the weak sun would shine in the cold white window,

And I would lounge by the wall,

With radio, with enchantments, with sorrow never expressed,

Except in insomnia fears and unknown whispers,

Where I could recline, fall, and weep gladly,

Repeating "for myself, myself".

And the nights! O my lost comicbook nights!

Frozen under glass, half-remembered, incoherent,

Nights so pristine-pure, shamefully lost!

Night, night, with not a whisper in it,

Not a threat of the shadow to fall,

In whirpooled chambers left bare to the elements,

Under electric light,

Chanting magic formulas, sacrificing rudiments of

Love, ashamed.

Ghost 6

I conceived a great poem of the night. Among the clutter of comic-books, the light-slanted shade, the crumby carpets, the empty bed. I realised, significantly and triumphantly, over days and months, that I had lost something great. I had been living, not with knowledge of her, but with the exaggerated image of her beauty, a phantom looming large in my imagination but at the same time corrupted, despicably remote. It was a phantom I still expected to see outside, in the blue evening, from my bedroom window, traipsing listlessly across vacant lots and railway yards. I realized that the most affecting and valid word in all of our language is "loss". Loss of beauty, loss of love, loss of life. I watched it recede, day by day, hour by hour, and every day as the evening wore on I confronted it, examined it, let it affect me fully. And after all the sorrows and self-recriminations had worn away, I felt somehow alive, warmed, exalting in the death of love. And that word contained nothing now for me but loss, repeated a hundred times over, as my eyes looked forward, piercing the furthest extremities of the night.

I now saw it in terms of universal loss, loss intensified till it became acutely, exactly nothing. Loneliness is such an unbearably, oddly beautiful thing. And so, I turned my eyes again to her phantom, an image that had long ceased to bear any resemblance to reality, but was just that, a phantom, a last remembrance. Her face in my mind was turned away from me and deathly-white, her frozen black hair obscuring her mouth, but a mouth which would be screwed-up bitterly. In my imagination she always appeared in the evening, and was made of night, and was always remote, and was always alone, answering by her steps and sighs the beats of my heart.