After the movie, Jack Step thinks maybe he’ll go to Kansas
The stage increases to monstrous dimensions.
A plush, red-seated theater constructs itself, the rows receding as far as the naked eye can see to a pinpoint in the middle of the dark, enclosed horizon. The walls on either side, from the stage to the horizon, are floor-to-ceiling mirrors. There isn’t an empty seat in the house.
Hundreds of clown costumes hang from the rafters just above the stage floor. Steve Kowalski cannot be seen among them.
But as he begins to speak he appears to move forward, as by cinematographic sleight of perspective, while the clown costumes blur behind him.
Now front and center, speaking into the camera, he says:
“This poem, in ancient Greek-like quantitative verse, as opposed to English-like syllabic verse, is called ‘The Newspaper’.”
He begins:
“The seed that wants to know what is eternal in the Earth
Is already dead; the black wine spreads over the contended fields
And pours a sea of hubris down the unslaked gullets of mortals,
Over the petty hearts of sanctimonious men beholden to the media
Bending beliefs to their gluttonous urgings, parceling new orders
From the minds of multitudes straining to be moved by truth
The truth of this Earth that gives up naught but ceaseless wailing
And infinite sorrow, pouring into the ocean of negation
Silence screamed into the futility of measureless absence
Lines and profound passages and the broken valor of gnashing teeth
Is this all we have left on this Earth of the only Book of Comfort?
Hearkening to their amplified periods veiled in the craft
Of subtle misdirection, coiling in serpentine logics through
The standard and obligatory columns, running page after page
Treacherously agitating the direction of the seed of mayhem
Petitioning the uncontrolled and insane as a form of reason
The petty and quaking hearts of hidden men are made bigger, fattened by guile.
Line breaks down after line and each lurches out of the bounds of pretended logic,
Arguments, made for the sake of clarity, triumph in the science of madness
And the conspirators gladden they will now send millions to their destruction
Say you a speech, sanctified by the insanity of your captains
Preach you and shout into and against the frenzied shouts of the captains
Who thunder in their madness, smelling the greatness of the battle afar off
And laugh they through the pealing of the horns and the blaring of the trumpets
The bread was broken over the sanctity of the battle and the wine was poured
Under the damning sun in streams of sorrow to consecrate the victory of the dead
The smell of war and the thunder of the captains all about their ears,
Their drunken mouths moving commands unheard afar off
And drunken minds bending in brave loyalty and blind animal obeisance
The reliefs of veins stark in their necks, the sweeping swords overhead
Heavy with conviction and the eyes bulging from their heads
The hoarse silent cries only imagined, tongues turn hallucinations in the minds of the hearers
Who watch the lips move but can’t hear the words formed
Rolled over in chariots and horses, and the legions and battalions
And every man armed to do the will of their commanders
Asking in their hearts – is this truly what must be?
Sucked I this knowledge, foreordained, partaking of the blackest wine
Dead in my mouth and poured out endlessly in sorrowful torrents
Made me to suck flagons down to sate an evil thirst in the measureless fields of grief.
And I remember dreaming in the midst of my exhaustion,
I lay down in the field of battle as though one of the dead
And the captains and the horses and the death of comrades and of enemies
Thundered down above me, the slaughter and the carnage and the fields of men laid waste
To every side, in an endless sea of corpses, the gleam of prostrate armor
Waving gently into the horizon against the raging sun
And I was sudden too weak to resist the weight of my lids
The fierceness of my limbs subdued and their power buckled, the strength of my arms depleted,
And overcome I fell helpless midstride to the ground into deepest slumber
And though I heard the battle cries afar off I could not return into the fray
But as though indeed dead and my ghost sped on shafts of light
Sleep drew me inexorably into another world, where I knew not the other whence I came.
And I dreamt a dream.
I was in a meadow of green fields swept by a warm wind
And the riled leaps of heroes onto swords and into ditches, blood-drained and dead,
Blew away from me, and my cares and burdens, of my flesh and of the heart and of my mind and of my soul
Fell away
And I moved away from them, remembering them as though they were afar off,
Leaving them to recede in the distance and thinking them to be so strange
And the triumphs commanded and the victories cried for
And the faceless deaths, the broken host of our armed millions
The losses of those millions and their defeats
Seemed suddenly to me so utterly strange, and I wondered if this was real
And I asked if it was real, fearing the answer to be a dream
And if it was a dream, wanted to die in it, never to awaken,
So strange these things were, did seem and appear, and stranger than the gods and their auguries
And a voice came out of the earth, and a woman’s
Soft voice of beauty, like a songbird’s, like the breeze that washed the face of the meadow
Wherein I lay, asked me what I believed not of the moment
For she said she had been commanded to tell me that my vision was true
And that all the things I would dream within the ensuing seconds
Would come to pass indeed
And I in humility bowed my head and asked that she rise from the earth
That I might believe, and she rose and embraced me, swelling around me that we became one,
And my loins filled with thunder, coursing hot speed down the shaft
The seed of their knowledge, and spilled I and gushed and gushed into her deep.
And though I yet remembered them, and still, they returned back to me
Their faces, my friends and comrades-in-arms, dead and strewn over the fields of battles
And those I knew by look but not by name
And those millions and millions more I did not know
We to each other known and faceless unknown, both
All very much the same,
Remembered them I yet, like the image of some ghost,
Receded broken and dissolved, came back to me, that had seemed so strange, and the stranger
The more that had fallen and kept falling forever back into their earth
Spilled of the black wine and spent of the corrosive alchemy that had made them,
Exhausted at the bottle’s lip, the drunk-swollen tongue grown fused one with the font and spout
They lay in the defeated field of battle, littered over with filth and obscene materials,
Covered over and buried with the lies and calumny and deceit of the shifting lips and eyes
That maligned my comrades-in-arms who had warred and died for their sake,
Covering them in the filth of cheaply come-by and manufactured lies and calumny, sold dearly to eager takers dealing in wickedness and every sort of debauch and iniquity
And traded feverishly with lunatic murderous zeal on the exchanges of the market of evil
Their false-derived artificial values inflated by spurious increments of depravity
Toward the shameless worship of mammon and unlimited profits
Foretelling gibberish visions, salvaging the shadows in the nonsense blurs
Of banal and trite words made great and grand by stealth and the subtle craft of mass media
Manipulation and time-tested PR methods of targeted misinformation campaigns
Mixed with the mass production of cut-rate sights and sounds, crass tastes and repellent textures
Accumulated formulae stored in cans and vessels and readily retrieved for an infinite pittance,
Jabbering our redemption was in the swaggering franchises
Multiplied endlessly
That called the shots across the plastic and digital syndicates forever making
Crucial breakthroughs and revolutionary technological advances
Voyaging underworld, fierce, unrelenting strong and infinitely corrupted
Into our minds. And I awoke in the field of quieted war
And all the dead lay in their millions, no longer of this earth, but interred back in it,
In the insanity of their mass carnage and slaughter
In the blood-drenched plains around me, and I, sinking in the earth and blood, lay aghast
And swollen with shock and speechlessness, and only my silence rising
From my mouth like an evil tree, fruited with paralyzed anguish and despair.
Eat it, you, and become free. And I was no longer a soldier of war
But a simple man who could neither move nor speak.
Gabriel, where is your cloud
Your cloud of steel
That you may strike
Strike at my heel
Zero in grief
Zero in tears
I fall into a cheering sea of hats that wave without heads or hands.”
People exit the Kyiv Cinema across from Lev Tolstoy Square silent and bewildered.
Filed by Jack Step for Encore Performances, Annex Editions, January 21, 2014