Star Late Rising

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Copyright © 2024 by R. Luce

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To John

PREFACE

January 28, 2023

It has been two years since it started: the writing of a play that now becomes a not-play, a splash of not-quite black words upon the light gray of my computer screen, word sounds roiling in the openings of my ears and cascading over rocks of meaning and rushing into my brain’s caverns before I can catch them, examine them, claim them.

My eyes are heavy. My body is tired, has been for a long time: too much work, too little sleep—an unconquerable and relentless problem. When I try sleeping, voices of my creations talk: Dave, Jack, Matt, Fool among them. Sometimes they talk in languages I can’t understand—a code that makes some kind of sense but for which I can’t find words in my own tongue. Though I like them and want to spend time with them, I wish they would quiet down and let me sleep, rest, deal with them from a fresh perspective.

It’s this brain of mine. I bring these characters into my world and then they won’t shut up until I do something with them. I try to convince myself that they are better than other voices competing for my attention—voices like those of my literary progenitors who constantly demand that I find more of me than I have ... or more accurately, more than I’ve been able to find in myself thus far. It feels to me sometimes that there is an unnamed something I am expected to discover hiding in a grocery-bag-wrapped package hidden behind a locked door to some unused room somewhere in the folds of my brain. If there is such a space—a hidden room—I don’t know which hallway it is down or on which floor or fold of the multi-tiered, multi-roomed gray mass to begin looking. An architectural drawing of the space I inhabit in my head might be helpful, but if I ever had one, I must have lost it somewhere along the roads of my life experiences.

As if I didn’t have enough distractions related to trying to be a writer, I have to deal with the voice of negativity always ready to toss a bomb into what little confidence I have. It is merciless, knows every trick for using my own self-doubts and fears against me: You aren’t good enough ... never will be, Nobody cares about what you have to offer, and many other quite disturbing statements that I have to over-talk with ego statements, Why not? You lie! Shut up! I’m doing it anyway! and The worst that can happen is it’s a flop, and it’s my flop to make! Now, don’t get me wrong, sometimes they help me figure out what I need to do. I like looking at things from different points of view and I like having to rethink what I previously thought I meant—sometimes having to rearrange my world around new ways of thinking, but I wish they—those discordant voices—would come at me one at a time instead of their usual trick of talking all at once; and, though I need and want to be humble, I wish the negative voices would tone it down a bit ... quite a bit, actually.

Of course, I know the voices are my own, my way of trying to figure out what makes the art of saying versus the skill of putting words together in sentences. When I am at my best, I think of art as a way of being and becoming rather than as a profession. Fame and riches have eluded me, and I have eluded them, and I think that best. Some people seem to think of art as a means for an artist to gain some kind of immortality, but it strikes me as a silly concept, a self-aggrandizing fantasy that rots in the ground beside the carcasses of its believers. For me art is about living my brief moments upon this planet as honestly as I am able and making things that go beyond the utilitarian and that attempt to answer, Why? My time is spent in trying to understand who I am and who we humans as a species are beneath the façades we show to one another—the good, the bad, and the downright ugly, our self-delusions and the mental constructs created for us through coercion and judgments of others—that which we call culture—others telling us who we are, were, might be, and should be, much of it steeped in mendacity. So many layers of lies lie between thick tungsten-skinned layers of fear and self-loathing. Lies are much easier to deal with than truth. Truth is maddeningly difficult to find, and often, when we think we’ve found it, it escapes and becomes something else that later becomes something other than that. As far as I am concerned, being an artist isn’t so much about finding the truth as it is about seeking the truth and marking steps along the way to remind ourselves—and interested others, if they exist—where I and we have been. Being an artist is about trying to find something worth saying in some symbolic form—something that I can use as a touchstone to inspire me to carry on when I am discouraged by my fellow human beings (which is quite often). If others are inspired by what I make, all the better; that’s a gift for my ego, but I maintain that it must be irrelevant to the act of making art honestly.

This thing that I am about to create is a book-I-want-to-read-but-which-hasn't-been-written-so-I-have-to-write-it (a la Toni Morrison), and it frightens me. It’s not my first attempt. The words, stories, and experiences behind it have written themselves into and out of existence like grocery lists over the past two years, yet my mind returns incessantly to the sounds and images that demand I write them. If you are reading this, it probably means they succeeded, and I liked the book I wrote.

Chapter 1: PROLOGUE

January 6, 2022.

[Enter the fool.]

(A middle-aged man carrying a half-full bottle of whiskey steps out of a doorway into the faint blue light of the backstage like a man set ashore by Charon at hell’s entrance with nowhere to go but forward in search of the red-orange light of fire and the sound of Hades’ mournful song. He scrunches his eyes and cheeks, holds his shoulders high and tight, turns his neck and head from side to side as he puts one foot cautiously in front of the other without tripping over something he cannot see. Guided by the ever-so- faint yellow light creeping in between the stage curtain and the proscenium wall, he stops at the hand-lock device holding taut draw ropes stretched between the bolted casing’s pulleys and the immense weight of the grand drape hanging upon the batten overhead. He grips the hard rasp-like skin of the rope, holds it as if to honor how much depends upon the multitudinous fibers and its stack of counterweights.  He tries to remember how and by whom the Harlequin’s hat has been placed upon his head, one of its prongs dangling a wooly ball just above his brow. He releases his grip on the rope to tuck the whiskey bottle between his knees, then reaches up, pulls the fool’s crown off his head. He stares at it, studies the three floppy, conical shoots that burst from the band and bend happily like thin-stemmed, bloom-heavy peonies. The hat turns round and round in his hands as he follows the flawlessly placed diamond patterns on the hat’s cloth: black diamond, white diamond, alternating, perpetual circles around the stems climaxing in red pompoms at the top. Black, white, red he assumes, but knows that blue light tells lies about what the light of day says.)

FOOL: [Looking at the hat.] Thou art a flaccid trinity bowing before a Fool!

(As he squeezes his knees upon the whisky bottle, it is beginning to slide from its thick belly to its neck; he lowers one hand to catch it and set it ever so gently like a child on the matte black floor—a floor made to kill light and swallow it whole.  As he straightens, the bottle fades to black. Frightened, he, reaches down to feel for it, makes note of where it is in relation to his feet. When the crown is reset on his head and the bottle’s neck is safely back in his hand like a Christmas goose in a Dickens’ tale, he stares into the barely visible space before him. Though he might not say it, he has long thought of this eerie necessity of staging as a sadness of lights grudgingly given. But it takes getting used to even for the young with good eyes. Blue light is meant to serve, prevent his or anyone’s human propensity for self-destruction, destruction of property, and harm to one another—actors crashing into crew members standing in gloomy shadows or actors arriving out of the bowels of the building thoughtlessly to the call for Places! However, until the eyes adjust, It is like awakening in a lightless room, far from the light switch, and no one in the bed to cling to. As he waits for whatever is or isn’t to come, he speaks softly in a Shakespearean dialect.)

FOOL: A tittering tease of light, thou art, that leads us all-too-soon to sunlit fame ere thou taketh us home into eternal night.

(He lifts the bottle from the floor, holds it belt-high on his waist, unscrews its cap, tilts his head back and takes a drink, then wipes his lips on his stained shirt sleeve. The act of dropping his head as it follows the bottle downward to its place on the floor causes one of the hat prongs and attached pom to drop; his first instinct is to catch it like a falling coin, but he is a whippet chasing a mechanical rabbit in a race it needn’t run for a prize it will never get and lying down to rest once the running is done. As he lifts himself off the floor, his eyes catch a hint of white light sneaking through the minute space between the massive drape and the stage floor. It is a beckoning from the other side, the side where the people are—an evening’s voyeurs waiting like him for whatever is or isn’t to come. With his back against the stone and concrete of the proscenium wall, he takes hold of the thick, most-likely-red-or-blue-or-purple velvet curtain and pulls it back just far enough to see that there is a spotlight shining on the center of the wide drape he is holding. It is a powerful light, one that makes an orb of rose ringed by shades of coral, orange, and reds, reds that deepen in the residual light escaping from the edges of the focal point into the blackness made by the absence of Lekos, Ellipsoidals, and Fresnels. He steps away from the wall to stand behind the drape, using it to cover his body as he pulls it slowly, as unnoticeably as possible, far enough back for him to peak around its edge and look briefly into the house, hears an old admonition playing in his head.)

If you can see them, they can see you!

(But he cannot see them. He sees only black beyond the spot’s relentless blinding beam coming from somewhere high above the house. Releasing the drape slowly, he listens for subdued coughs, shuffling of feet, sounds of any life beyond himself. But there is nothing, no discernable sound, nothing but the spotlight waiting, nothing but him deciding what to do with the nothing he is in. He looks backstage once more, hoping someone comes into view who knows what to do, someone who can point him to an exit for an inconspicuous escape, or someone who will push him out onto the stage. Someone to do something.)

But there is no one beyond himself except for me, and I will not interfere.

FOOL: Do something, Fool! Anything! Anything is better than nothing! Act!

(The beating drum of self-abuse continues, raises his hackles, makes him want to lash out against it, having to make sense of this place, this strange now that he can’t seem to escape. He takes a slug of whiskey, looks back at the dark behind him, turns back to the light,  pushes the curtain back and steps onto the stage, feels the sudden warmth of the spot on him, hears uproarious applause, whistles, shouts, and stamping feet—the Huzzahs he had called such things in the old days. The spotlight follows him as he walks unsteadily forward to the center of the stage, turns to face the blackness emitting the sounds of appreciation for his arrival, shakes his head in an attempt to clear the effects of the alcohol, and then bows before the din of appreciation. He feels the pull of the sloshing bottle lowering toward the stage floor, hears it clunk briefly on the wood. He smells the odors that cling to his worn, wrinkled, and holey clothes and the odors of his unwashed and sockless feet showing through the rips and tears in his canvas shoes. He rises from his bow as the applause, whistles, and shouts continue the adulation.)

FOOL: [Speaking quietly to himself.] They expect something of me; they think I know what to say, know what I am about to do, and why I am doing it. I don’t.

(He is standing in the light, having brought his mind and body, his bottle and, perhaps, a few dust-made footprints onto the stage).

Perhaps he is somehow aware of my presence, and it is to me that he speaks, expects me to help him. Or perhaps it is another self to whom he speaks, a more confident self, a remembrance