Bird pressed his fingers to his face, willing them to disappear. A hand rapped at the front door. Bird lowered his hands. The letterbox flapped open.
“You don’t live there,” Emily said, peering through the flap.
“Yes I do,” Bird said, though he wondered if he should ignore the child.
Bird gripped the chair arms. Its leather crumbled beneath his fingertips. The television lurched forward as if its screen was suddenly too heavy for the table’s legs.
“Then the big old bulldozer is going to knock you down.”
Bird stood and stumbled across the room. His back stooped beneath the unexpected weight of his head. The letterbox slammed shut. Behind Bird, the television fell silent. He should open the door and run. Knock over Emily if he had to and not care if her porcelain head broke.
“Are you still there?” he asked. When Emily didn’t reply, Bird shouted, “Are you still there?”
“Are you?” Emily said, and then she skipped away, her heels tap-tap-tapping on the pavement.
Bird stooped and lifted the letterbox, peering through the two-inch gap. Emily and the Puppet King waved at him from the gate. Bird moved away from the door. His hand shivered in front of him, as though it thought to ward the pair off. His skin looked paper-thin. Cut him open and perhaps you’d find a door to where Vivian had gone. Upstairs, whatever had thudded against the bedroom door finally broke through. Bird’s knees gave way and he landed on the bags of Vivian’s things.
She’d left him. For the most part, he’d been certain of that. She’d wanted to leave, had intended to, that part was true, but he couldn’t remember her actually walking out. No tearful last goodbye. Then there was the question of the things she’d left behind. Above him, the stairs creaked. Bird looked up.
“You don’t look well, Bird,” Vivian said.
Words caught against Bird’s throat. The television roared with laughter.
“Here’s Vivian,” Dirk Almond said.
Bird shivered as his Vivian descended the stairs. A puppet girl with her strings cut, their tattered remains dribbling from her wrists. He’d wanted her to come back to him, but not like this. She looked too thin, thinner than he’d become, and her perfume was stale and sour. She used to smell of lavender.
Behind him, the letterbox opened. Bird turned. The Puppet King winked at him. Thin wooden fingers and a crown pushed through the letterbox. Bird sat transfixed as the Puppet King placed the crown on Bird’s head.
From the television, Dirk Almond said, “We are pleased to announce a new puppet show starting tomorrow, kids. Bird Man at 3:35 pm. Make sure you’re watching. It’s going to be fun, fun, fun.”
Vivian towered over Bird. She grasped his wrists and wound string about them.
“The show can’t go on without you, Bird. I tried to get them to take just me. Honest. I tried everything.”
His Vivian pulled him up, manipulating him as he had once manipulated her. Bird’s head wobbled forward, bounced upon his pencil neck. He wanted to trace her face with his fingers, but she turned her back to him and left him dangling in the doorway. In the living room, Vivian wheeled the television and its table away from the wall. A grey screen flickered, the words The End bleeding through in yellow.
The Theatre and its Double
By Edward Morris
“And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.”
–William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
B-ROLL:
L’EMPEREUR A VÊTU AVEC LE SOLEIL
(PAR FRANÇOIS VILLÓN, au Paris, ca.1457
Asile d’Aliénés de St. Eustache )
Supprimé par Antonin Artaud, 1928-
ACT 1, SCENE 1
THE PHANTOM OF MUSIC
CHORUS LEADER
Road-child, bare-faced farmboy, prodigal Prince,
The young Josephus, King Hastur’s son, of House de Jaune
who would be King in those times, in his own daydreams,
Scribal half-blood son of a genocidal necromancer
Who blew himself away before the boy was born,
Away, away, in a blast of white light not quite light,
when he spoke the Name. Cassandra stayed,
And raised Josephus far away
From dead Hastur’s kingdom, hastily
renamed....
CHORUS
Beyond the sky, the Hyades sing
The song the bells of Death now ring
Must die unheard, become No Thing,
in Lost Carcosa.
The Hyadian Gates now cannot swing
Where flap the tatters of the King,
The firmament now just a thing
Above Carcosa.
Strange is the night where such stars rise,
Black holes of light which gaze like eyes,
And three moons waltz swamp-fireflies,
in Dim Carcosa,
In stormy skies, the islands break,
Both cloud and land float in that Lake,
A double sun, a Kingly wake
In Carcosa ...
~*~
A-ROLL:
LE RÉPARATEUR DES RÉPUTATIONS
Many call me insane. If I was insane, would I not deny it? Is it insane to fall in love with the landscape of a dream, the precise meeting of two hills above a road of dead stones, where one walks and cannot use words to ask for shelter? So it is to write, in the regions of new space up in the Moon, dreaming, while others sit at home. I partake in planetary gravitation within the fissures of my mind and the tangibility of Man’s intentions.
I am never settled in the continuity of my life. My dreams are offered no escape, no refuge or guide. Truly the rankness of severed limbs. I feel a longing not to be, never to have fallen into this sink of imbecilities, abdications, renunciations, and obtuse contacts. I long for the yellow light of Dreamtime, this virtual, impossible light which nonetheless I find in real life.
~*~
The repeated miracle of Dawn was wrought before my eyes just after I woke and took my medicine. I saw the first of the electric lights sparkling off into blackness far among the linden trees. It is April in Paris, and every garden on every street is suffused with that bizarre primal honey that makes sunbeams fall from flowers, trees, clouds, flickering in the deep sky after a long storm.
When the morphine began to work, as I gazed into the cobalt heavens, the shredded mist rising along the river was touched with purple and gold, and acres of meadow and pasture dripped precious stones. That mist drifted among treetops kissed with fire, while in the forest depths faint sparkles came from some lost ray of morning light falling on wet leaves.
Then the sun, the yellow sun, and everything grew stark again.
~*~
When we speak the word “Life,” it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach. When we write, my dear Journal, we start with where we are, to get away from it: These dilapidated spiral staircases at the back of this old firetrap theatre, with all the little doors at every end of every hall.
I start with the scratches my cat Pierrot left up and down my forearms, these funny sun-glasses with the false nose I wear today, my sweat, my pallor, my teeth.
I have fifteen men, five boys and three women in my employ, who are poorly paid, but who pursue the work with an enthusiasm which possibly may be born of fear. My goblin brood come from every shade and grade of society. I choose them at my leisure from those who reply to my advertisements.
It is easy enough. I could treble the number in twenty days if I wished. When they turn on me, I invite them up here to my office for a little chat. We smoke a little mari-huana, have a drink.
The last one of those was the editor of Paris-Match.
We left arm-in-arm, bellowing laughter.
I flew lights with Dullin, and painted sets with Pitoeff while we edited each other’s work. I wrote the mise-en-scene for the first Surrealist film ever produced. No scribbler or stage-hand could withstand the chaos and joy which are mine to dispense in this strange, roaring year of 1929. I repair the reputations of other playwrights by ruining my own to run their work here at our place. Tomorrow, the Surrealist jackal bastards snap them up like ants on a dead bird. Even if I did succeed in certain cases, it would cost me more than I would gain by it.
But there are some plays which must be run, though my Opening Night may be cursed like Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” by a maniac in a Pallid Mask, grinning in terror or triumph, who takes my theatre apart, some species of stage-hand who made the mistake of reading the original folio I sometimes forget to place under lock and key.
Allow me to explain. We begin our first rehearsal in several days...
~*~
B-ROLL:
ACT 1, SCENE 2
THE PHANTOM OF DOUBT
DARKNESS. STARLIGHT. CREATURE in what appears to be TATTERED CLOAK AND COWL OF JAUNDICED HUMAN SKIN takes the stage. CREATURE’S FACE is hidden in high, peaked goblin hood. Star-light should be made to look black. This is THE KING IN YELLOW.
KING IN YELLOW
The day has come! The day has come!
It is done. While falling through the worlds I’ve now remade,
I longed to follow Cassilda. But I’d gone too far, when I finished
Father’s work. Too far. Too far.
I remember when her meddling little sister Camilla found
Father’s temple,
Or what was left of it, as I vainly tried to finish the Work.
I remember her
scream,
And the awful spell I spoke...
Now the tatters of martial law sweep through the
Hyadian Gate,
down the wind between worlds, even to Earth. Fear not,
good people here, for I shall rise in the face of the next
great army, and cause a tempest on two continents.
My skin-fingers, tongues, eyes, still flap across the skies,
through that smoking sky-lake which connects the
Kingdoms
of Hastur, Aldebaran, and Yhill (where the natives know
none of this, and think all such things monstrously im possible,)
and deepest Demhe that sank beneath the waves long ago,
Even the sky of Earth which the hateful Croy Castaigne closed off
with his churlish suicide in my laboratorium, to Uoht and Thale,
Naotalba, all the poli that once gave Father tribute, and gave me....
THE KING IN YELLOW OPENS HIS KALEIDOSCOPE EYES, WHICH ILLUMINATE.
KING IN YELLOW
Which gave me my story, poor ignorant lambs of Earth,
Led to a slaughter you cannot understand,
KING PARTS FLESHLY CLOAK TO REVEAL SHINING CREATURE BENEATH IT, IN SPLENDID DIADEM, AND A WHITE SILK ROBE EMBROIDERED WITH A YELLOW GLYPH: A HAWK WHOSE TALON PIERCES A RABBIT’S SKULL. THE SHAPE OF THE YELLOW SIGN SUGGESTS A CROOKED CROSS.
The story of the Last Great King,
Prodigal Prince set out on the road,
In a yellow, threadbare Family Cloak–
KING RAISES HANDS SKYWARD, EYES TOO BRIGHT TO LOOK UPON
KING IN YELLOW
It is done, it is done! Let the nations rise and look upon their King,
King in my right in Hastur’s land, because I know the mystery of the Hyadian Corridor between worlds! I swam down the Lake of Hali,
and beheld Earth. Father’s journals showed me the way,
In between the backward alphabets and cryptic
plants, In between the sketches of King Hastur’s human toys.
My crown, my empire, every hope and every ambition,
Now lived forward, understood backward, seizing me from behind,
Binding me in my own skin, until my whole voice is a scream,
And Memory worries me with her black, black beak.
I rage, bleeding, infuriated, having seized
Throne and Empire, and lost everything.
Woe! Woe to he who is crowned the King in Yellow!
I understood not
That saying the name of the Conqueror Worm at the end of Time itself
(Eater of Stars, Devourer of Pasts,)
Would melt me in the crucible of the Logos, change
My shape, explode my essence, burst me like a balloon,
Yet my remains still could not die, and slithered again
To life, tatters of mind, seeking tendrils of parchment skin,
Seeking to begin
To finish the Play
of which we are all part,
But my cousin, le Castaigne,
wrench in every plan,
Poisoned the way to Earth,
polluted my Working
with his own poncing,
putrefacting corpse,
Slit ear to ear by his own hand,
bleeding the family blood
of his Uncle Hastur,
closing the way,
Shutting off that part of my sky
[folio page is missing]
~*~
A-ROLL:
THE KING IN YELLOW has been called ‘the most deliberately authorless play in the world.’ On the surface, the play is a Phantastic, otherworldly tale set before the beginning of Time, in a far land. On the surface, it is a potboiler monarchical melodrama about a deposed wizard-king, and a young betrothed girl who falls in love with her husband’s cousin.
Her husband, who becomes the King In Yellow, kills his cousin when he dons the mantle, and the wife kills herself in horror and grief. The very banality and innocence of the first act only allows the blow to fall afterwards with more awful effect
No definite moral principles are violated in those pages, no doctrine proselytized, no convictions outraged. It cannot be judged by any human unit of measure, yet. Although human nature might not bear the original, un-arranged “score” if you will, the story strikes the supreme note of Art.
In this instance, the play is the Theatre . . . and its double, in which the essence of purest cosmology lurks.
Robert W. Chambers, one of the most successful commercial authors of the early Twentieth Century, muddied the waters when he wrote the popular version, a series of highly precious and confusing short stories revolving around a fictionalized version of the Marquis de Sade’s banned play “L’EMPEREUR A VÊTU AVEC LE SOLEIL”. In turn, de Sade had plagiarized much of the essential plot from the play of the same name by Molière, which was also banned and never performed, or read. Both versions were allowed to lapse from print, and no one knows what collector has acquired either.
A version that fits somewhere between the Paris of Molière’s day and that of de Sade was first released in Europe in a very limited craft press run by Tristan Tzara (with his fifty-foot lines in his old hat) in the mid-Twenties.
The limited edition was not much more than a curio printed on demand by the very wealthy, foolhardy or impecunious. Tzara claimed to have made the decision to publish the play in a fit of misanthropic hatred for the human race, so much so that he wished to bring about the Biblical End of Days.
Old Tzara now recants this fit, but it is mostly an empty gesture. The Tzara manuscript is shit. It contains an impossibly muddied version of the original, more akin to Finnegans Wake than the original play; which predates Dada, Surrealism, even the Irrealism of de Sade.
~*~
This play is an idea, one which is alive, as all ideas live. One which cannot be killed. The King cannot be killed. It has been far too long for that. The Seven Worlds were fractured at a point in our own history before the colonization of the New World, America.
Now America is laboratory and growth medium for the most spectac
ular failure of any empire since Rome, when her banks call in all those notes that America has defaulted on to pay for its fascist Futurism. It will come. Soon enough. In my dreams, the hellish King shows me men jumping from windows, men who look like American bankers. There is no one to catch them.
~*~
But I dare not speak of that yet. The play is in three acts of roughly five scenes each, and the original folio something like three hundred pages. Not all these pages are full. One or two contain only a single line of dialogue, or utterance. Any more, and the page could not hold it. The illustrations are much saner than the text. That says little.
The cosmology of the play is Gnostic, Manichaean, Blakeian. In the Beginning was the Mess, and the perception of the Mess, into degrees of Light and Shadow, Chord and Discord. When things began to separate, the playwright seems to believe, Life began to hurt.
In the Beginning, things began to separate. In the Beginning, things hurt. The Beginning happened when the King’s mind shattered into seven pieces. When He rose and roared the name his Father captured, the name of God, the rags of his robe flapped and rattled in the winds of seven worlds.
Seven doors in the Hyadian Corridor, down through the snakes of fire, and choking frozen fog of Lake Hali’s black and smoking tarn in the sky. Betrayed, the King had spoken the name of the Conqueror Worm at the end of Time. Over a woman.
It’s always over a woman. Josephus spoke the name, and thrust the scalloped gauntlets on his fists out before him, and made steaming cracks in the ground as the holes between worlds sucked part of Him in, cloak first, and gave Him an eye, an ear, a whispering undead hand in each.
~*~
In the Beginning, the King wrecked everything. So He could fix it. In the Beginning, the King started Time the way it is now. High on His throne, He makes no move to mouth apologies, merely watches with every eye as the smaller parts of Himself repeat the dance, the endless reel, the ridda, over and under, in and out, clap hands...
~*~
Clap hands. In the beginning, there was Shit. In the beginning, the first living thing chose to complete the process of coming to life, and expelled the dead parts of itself, so it could exist all the way. To live, one must only stop struggling, but to live in the flesh one must shit.
Man made that covenant, to live in the meat for a short time, then volunteer himself up to die, and let the beasts eat him. To spend his whole live holding onto the smallest part of the world he can understand, behaving like the beasts which will one day devour him whole, living by the clock he made to stop Time and drive back the eternal, incalculable light of the Void that every one of us offers ourself up to in the true Mass, without any intermediary, as She approaches with all Her forms, and circles us, and penetrates.
A Season In Carcosa Page 9