AN UNDERGROUND MANIFESTO
by Connor Coyne
7th Rough Draft
- Time
This manifesto cuts, razor like, across something old and profound which must be forgotten and something new and simple which must be remembered. It's 3 PM by Jessica's clock, 2:52 by mine, 2:50 in reality. B.O.B. by Outkast is playing loud on the radio and it's hot in my room: I left the fan at the theater. My window is open with no screen. Hyde Park boulevard winks at the end of the alley, packed with bricks and windows and green leaves crowning the overhead, children walking home from school, cars crammed on the edges, and the alley opening, its ghost floodlight quiet because it's still overcast and bright light out. My window faces east, but a lot of ambient light is filtered in through the light cloud cover. It passes straight through the planet shawl Paul sent me, that hangs over the upper quarter of the window. My window is three by six feet, and is set in a space of wall angled forty-five degrees to the adjacent walls, in the southeast corner of the room. Otherwise, the room is a fifteen by fifteen square. The ceiling is ten feet high. The paint is cream white, and chipping. The window is six-feet, center set. Halfway down the window, on the left, I have stuck a yellow, Oriental paper fan. On the window sill squat beer, wine, whiskey, and gin bottles. Below the window is the radiator, with my stereo and speakers resting on 1000 years of Irish poetry (I kept this part because Malynne liked it). It is summer because it is about eighty degrees. It is May 2nd on Chicago's South Side. The south wall, from left to right, is lined with a black chest with stacks and stacks of miscellany piled on, a fiberglass table with cassette tapes beneath and stacked papers above, my computer desk, at which I sit, with Peeps, Mailing Tape, my watch, my drink (Coke), sock-puppets, class folders, pinter, and computer, all on different tiers. I am barefoot. Behind the desk is the storm pane and screen. Against the west wall is a box of play posters, boxes of clean laundry and photos, nothing in front of my closet door, and a bag of computer equipment in the corner. On the north wall, the door to the hall, coffee mugs and folders, a three tier bookshelf, and above, two more wall-mounted bookshelves, and the foot of my bed, which is projected from the wall by two cinderblocks, one topped by a pink box of art supplies. Against the east wall, the length of my bed, again projected by cinderblocks. There are books in between the cinderblocks. The bed is unmade. The bed is a queen sized mattress upon a box spring. On my walls are play posters, Ravenloft glosses, maps (of United States Interstates, Saginaw, Zanesville, Millersberg, Bucuresti, Romania and Bulgaria, Chicago, the World (political), Brasov, CTA El lines, the University of Chicago, Denver, Flint neighborhoods, Chicago neighborhoods, and Flint, Oakland County and Detroit merged into a single big map), two hubcaps (metal Buick, plastic Chevy), a painting of Angelos in the rain, signs salvaged from St. Joseph before it was demolished (the best read C514 Female Locker Room and CAUTION RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS), a Scooby Doo calender, set to May, with Daphne posing suggestively, two hats (an Oriental rice picking hat, and a sombrero), Kuntar the Kunt, postcards, a Peanuts strip featuring Patty and Charles, a wall of photographs of travels and home and family and friends, and pictures they've drawn for me, a poster of James Dean on a drizzly Broadway, a paper with notes for my BA project written on it, and graffiti I've done in black and red sharpie marker.
One of these is midway down the closet door, featuring two men standing outside a shanty on the downslope of an empty hill, gridlike in its desolation. One of the figures points up and out, and the other listens. Below, distant, and in the field of their vision to their right is a distant line of tiny houses, and behind, staggered rows of smoking factories. Above, the sky is dotted with black stars, and above all, a swollen moon with puckered lips, a black right eye staring out into space and an eye patch over the left. His face is all covered in craters. Below this drawing, the words: “Two men, in the environs, in sooty snow, staring at the moon."
This drawing was, in fact, a foreshadowing. I drew it in October or November last year. And in December, just days before Christmas, Sam and I drove all around Flint looking for something to do in a dying, factory town on a weeknight in winter. We found Halloway reservoir, to the northeast of the factories, and there, on a metal dock on an iced over lake, we stood under a bright moon and a molten sky.
It struck me at the time that the two moments were the same. - There is no more time.
This is something old and simple which must be forgotten and something new and profound which must be remembered. There is no more time, meaning, of course, that there is no more time as distinct from space. The universe has grown since we were children, and on May 2nd 2001, the most recent contestant is dark energy. Dark energy seems to be winning, hands down, and soon our Universe will be very very big and cold. Gangsta Shit is playing on my radio. Soon I will put on the Scratchie Sampler that Suzie sent me. I've never met Suzie in person. We haven't written in two years.
Time and space are measures of entropy. Time and space are only yardsticks to determine distance from the big bang. Our telescopes and computers see a rainbow colored swath strewn across the sky. To our eyes, it is invisible, but it is the Big Bang, raining down on us after ten billion years. We see this by looking out, and by looking out, we look back in time. Time travel is possible, because this light is radiation bombarding the earth. The Big Bang bombards the earth all the time from every direction. As it recedes away, it grows cooler, as do we. On an infinitely smaller scale, when I look across the room, I look back in time, instants my eyes cannot perceive, because the light from that part of the room takes time to reach me. And the scale of that time is the same to all time as the scale of that space is the same to all space.
If this doesn't make sense, you should read A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking, and if so compelled, A Short History of the Universe by Joseph Silk. Both are very user-friendly. The first is a little more dated, and the second is more technical.
I remember once, my father described, at a dinner party, at the end of December, how he would lie down and tour the universe. My father is a bone atheist. He believes that death is end and absolute, and his religion is what he observes and deduces of reality. He advocates what some might call skeptical science. But for him, this experience bordered on revelation... floating out, through the atmosphere, away from home, through the solar system and out into space, further, through the edge of our galaxy in into the larger void, out through the super cluster, and into void, and once he's gone twelvesome billion light years, it begins to get warmer. Then he feels nauseous and has to stop.
And theater is essential. And theater is real. We need theater so that we do not die. And when we die, our theater extends forever. - There exists an Underground.
This is something new and profound that must be remembered and something old and simple that must be forgotten.
There is a dark spot at the bottom of this page. It is programmed into the word processing program I type this on, that at the end of every page, there is a dark space. At the inception of each page, a dark space is formatted at the end. This is a mathematical certainty.
Wrong tape. I believe I put on the Smashing Pumpkins concert in Dublin ‘97 instead of the Scratchie Sampler. So it goes.
In Les Miserables, Victor Hugo writes of an Underground. This is a metaphor for culture. I extend it to Reality with a capital ‘r.' And Reality is apprehended through temporal space which is a quality of special space1.
In Les Misrables there is a chapter entitled “On Miners." The surface of civilization is the observable structure we see every day. This system of politics and philosophy, hospitals, factories, houses, apartments, parks, cities and countryside, suburb and ghetto, weddings, funerals, births, art and science, is all a structure. As such, it has been erected. And this surface has been erected by miners, who venture into the depths and fringes of society and extract mineral to change life above, and alter the structure through the alteration of its foundation. The central formula correlates depth with connection, and progress. Depth is disassociation from the surface. Progress is mining that changes the surface for the better. When Hugo ranks Luther, Descartes, Voltaire, Robespierre, and Marat by their depth, he is not simply passing a value judgment, but is commenting on the removal of each discourse from the familiar. This, combined with an inherent disinterestedness among miners (who “have a glance, and that glance seeks the absolute"), suggests a positive correlation between depth and apprehension of the Real. In other words: inundated by the bias of our day-to-day experience, we rarely run the risk of glimpsing something larger. Removal from that bias, in moments of surprise, alienation, or serendipitous chaos, the Universe oozes out through the cracks, and terrified, charged, and exalted, we think back on the moment for days, months, maybe years to come.
I have had moments like this. I remember, in particular, January 31st, 1997, 6 PM, standing in line at McDonalds after spending all of my money on music. It was the opening night of a play, and I was grabbing a 2 Cheeseburger Extra-Value meal on my way to the theater. I was on the outskirts of Flint, and the weather reached into the forties, melting mounds of dirty snow that hugged the curbs, and cars backed up for miles... everyone was out that day, and I never figured why. As I waited in line, among the tired, bored autoworkers and women with babies, the sun fell out of clouds and along the roof of K-Mart across the street. Everything was pink, azure, and silver. Something tinkled, and space and time cracked and the Universe oozed in, and that's all I can say about it.
Regardless, Hugo claims credit for the mining metaphor, but I've injected the Apprehension of the Real. Our greatest difference of opinion is most explicit in differing interpretations of the third substage. It is Hugo's “last mine," in which “disinterestedness vanishes." “It is the grave of shadows. It is the cellar of the blind." “This communicates with the abyss." “The I in the eyes howls, seeks, fumbles, and gnaws." “The wild specters who roam in this grave... take no thought for anything but the satisfaction of their individual desires." “They are almost unconscious, and there exists within them a sort of terrible obliteration." “For all forms of satisfaction, appetite." “They are brutally voracious... not [as] the tyrant, but [as] the tiger."
“That which craws in the third substage is no longer complaint stifled by the absolute; it is the protest of matter."
And it is as if this continuum through delving from assumption to observation to perception to apprehension culminates at a point in which nothing is perceived nor apprehended. I contest that the third substage is the point of absolute apprehension. When we descend into hungers and needs so basic that all recollection of the surface in which we are immersed falls away: this is absolute apprehension of the abstract, abstract apprehension of the absolute, the point of our immersion in the Real.
The need for food, warmth, procreation, and survival is as close as we will ever be to an understanding of our universe and our own nature.
The Underground theater is, and has been, and will be, a series of expeditions to the third substage. Each trip yields a couple dark gems.
And theater is essential. And theater is real. We need theater so that we do not die. And when we die, our theater extends forever. - Time travel is possible Underground.
This is something new and profound that must be forgotten, and something old and simple that must be remembered.
The Smashing Pumpkins concert is over. I have put on Everything is Wrong, by Moby. It is about 5:20. Jessica has come to visit. She is not in my room right now. Hyde Park boulevard is a little dimmer than it was before.
Theater, often defined in terms of a performance by one person, an actor, for another, her audience, and performance, defined in terms of a change over time, suffer a conventional crisis when confronted by the notion that space and time are ultimately inseparable. The contention may be raised that empirically, in our day-to-day lives, we experience time and space differently. That is, space may be revisited, and time may not. Time cannot be turned back. Time is always moving, while space (may be) stationary, and possibly even that space is a victim of time. Whether or not these statements are theoretically true, they are at least practically true, and useful distinctions for the moment.
However, such contentions elude the fact that there is a dimensional tension, and moreover, we are able to observe it. And besides, if theater, or anything else for that matter, is to contend for a moment with the Real, the interrelation of time and space must also be contended with2.
The conventional crisis is a front. A frame. A hoax. The correlation of time and space does not demand or ask that we abandon notions of tension, plot, subplot, rising and falling action, climax, and resolution. If anything, the evolution of the universe from a spark in which matter was so dense that its surface was opaque to a slowing acceleration of birthing galaxies and stars and the promise of asymptotic stillness, giving way recently to renewed acceleration that lends complete heat death is far more tragic and complete than the demise of the court of Elsinor. Oops. I just gave it away. Did you catch that?
Apologies for improviprofessionality. This is a manifesto. I can write whatever I want. If you aren't reading this for what it says, you can go to Hell. But if you are making an effort, then I kiss your cheek.
If anything else, the probability of a gravitational constant and hemmings and hawings of this expanding beast ask that, for any realistic performance, we devise a temporal space. We need not strip time its unique qualities. We extend these qualities to the performance space. And temporal space realized within the confines of a performance with set beginning, middle, and end is special space. And this kind of theater is essential.
Temporal space is space with timelike qualities. From point P to point Q, distance d between points is time t between events. The speed of light is not necessary to make this association. If a ball is thrown from P to Q, it will take t to traverse d. The scale is not relevant because the relationship remains. Therefore, an actor at P walking to Q in temporal paradigm is crossing space/time. The cross changes space and time. Both are changed simultaneously. Space is full of moments. Time is full of points. The scale is not relevant because the relationship is the same. Hamlet is, in fact, the story of the Universe. It is also the story of a hunger deferred and possibly absolved. In broad strokes, this is also the story of the Three Little Pigs, of Hansel and Gretel. The threads are not really so far apart. They are starting to come together.
The proviso which transforms temporal space, in which spatial actions have an acknowledged temporal consequence, and vice versa, into special space, is finitude. Whereas our entire universe and everything within it exists in temporal space, special space is performed, and has discrete boundaries. Within the construct of theater, or any other performance, this is the acknowledged beginning and end of performance, both in performance location and time of performance. In another sense, our lives are experienced within a special space, the boundaries being the space we occupy and the time we are alive (or vice versa).
Jessica has left. It is 6:10. I found the Scratchie Sampler. It is playing now.
And this is the essentiality of theater: the special boundaries are chosen. They are fitted both to circumstances, and necessity. Unlike biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, sociology, psychology, etc., which all depend on an continuous, and often recursive reference to accumulated knowledge, theater can toss in its shovels anywhere, at any depth, at a moment's notice. All that is needed is an actor, an audience, and an acknowledgment of performance. Such statements do not refute the necessity of other sciences; they do in a sense elevate the Underground theater to a science. If rigor and precision are the hallmark advantages of the hard science, then the Underground promises versatility and accessibility. It is an exploration and exposition of Reality, and can be performed by any infant trying to teach his mother to smile.
This is the same as the “double" language Artaud referenced in his essays. It is the strand that draws us back to the mechanics in Shakespeare time and again. The meaty empty behind the silences in Harold Pinter. The cacophony that arises from overlapping speech in Caryl Churchill. The structured rhythm of music, and its cross-cultural appreciation, the projection of both music and dance into live performance, their recurring presence in works of theater, the silent voice behind a naturalistic piece, the impulse in improvisation, the momentary affectation of an accent or imitation of a particular persons voice and motion, the silence above and about the enactment of religious ceremony, why poets and novelists read their works aloud, why actors, in the midst of warming up, fall suddenly into hypnosis. The performance of temporal space is something we have all engaged in. Seeking to perform temporal space, we cleanse ourselves to engage the ritual.
There is usually a tether. In the Underground, we tether lest we slide down and are unable to climb out, like Hugo's poor monsters, or those lost in hypnosis. This is a fire speech, an acknowledgment that performance is not reality, a discussion of cultural ramification, preshow music, or simple sitting in meditation. Then, the digging commences. The actors, named Deep Delvers, leave the surface, and the new world is erected from soil and minerals, maybe from the blueprint of a script or score, maybe from memory, maybe from impulse. The walls are dug out and conform to the boundaries of the special space, and once actors and audience are isolated from the outside and enclosed in special space, we plunge on, straight down. As light grows dimmer, forms are more indistinct, we resemble each-other more, our voices are echoed or absorbed by the soil without occluding our perfect understanding of what is being said, and as we go deeper and deeper the proximity of light is more and more reduced. Finally, in absolute darkness, we internalize what is being performed and live through the experience. We become those we adore and those we despise. We hear every voice as the voice of the darkness, we see every sight through the eyes of the darkness, we touch the floor and the floor is dark, and soon, we are the darkness. And so, you see, Iphigenia climbs the stairs to the altar to be sacrificed, and she looks out, and we know she sees us, and we are present. Gollum looks into empty space begging for his ring, and we are invisible too. Count Cenci declares himself God, and we are invited to join him. Rebecca invites the traveler to meet her father, Bethuel, and we drink at the ensuing slumber party. A boy is shot and dies, stands up and is shot and dies again, stands up and is shot and dies again, stands up and is shot and dies again, and the previously riotous crowd is silent. A girl is dancing in special space, and she draws a knife. When she sticks it in the table, we flinch, because she's stuck it into us, because we feel our arms plunging the knife and the wood give way beneath. Katie pulls out the Four of Cups and says there is something else behind the colors and we believe her. Brecht asks, ‘Have you ever noticed your watch?' and we look at our watch for the first time (there is no time). We are drunk and ask a girl to dance and we hear her hearing our voice slurring. We walk into a room where we are new, and see ourselves from everyone else's point-of-view. We dance because the rhythm is thicker than the music. We change the tape to Post by Bjork. We realize that it is later now, but still warm, that the blazing sun of a light mounted in the parking garage of the high-rise across Hyde Park boulevard has just flashed on, even as the real sun begins taking the last leg of its descent. And finally, we are here together, stranded deep in the glacier, hungry and cold and aching for more. Ascent is a shock. We are jolted as the numbness leaves, Reality seals all her cracks and slinks in retreat from the day-to-day. Back on the surface, we swear never to dig again. But we have to. Because understanding facilitates survival. Understanding comes from below.
1 All vocabulary words are conveniently written in italics, for easy reference.
2 Don't get me wrong: a story arc can be easily applied to Hamlet, just as it can be applied to some preschool children, dressed up as stars and trees, acting out a fairy tale. But this can be Underground theater as well.
