The Lines Are Not the Same

See what they’ve made for themselves.  It’s a world away from world, a stage away from stage. Not unlike our own, you say?  Here a glutton, there a glutton?  For every beggar a beggar, hero a hero?  Yet the lines are not the same – the lines through which they say what they do and do what they say.  Where they have stanzas, we had windows that opened and closed.  Where they have scenes, we had things that merely happened.  Where they have chapters, we had people who fell down and got back up again.

See how they make their way from line to line, from door to door, accepted here, accepted there, taken in, fed, and scrubbed up for the price of a rhyme.  See how the people open their cupboards to them, open their tables, their sons and their daughters to them.  Yet who of us would have them, with their uncouth ways?  Who of us would abide them, with their raucous airs?  If they returned to us, would we know them?  If they petitioned us for alms in exchange for a song?

No, their ways and their songs are not for us.  The lines are not the same.

                                -- from The Songs of the Greater Men (#19 – “In a Blanker Verse”)

Most of the settlers who peopled the first station

along the Periphery were those who

had participated in the didactic plays

with the most enthusiasm.  Accordingly,

the First Station became known early on

for the central importance of theatrical

interests and ambitions in the daily lives

of the people.  At the ceremony

that marked the First Station's inception was performed

a didactic play that had been hastily sketched

and discussed by the players on the trip

out to the station, and the players only had

to wait for as long as it took to determine

that enough men and women had gathered

around them in order to declare this Station

a true settlement.  Fittingly, the performance

reenacted the time when Menahmen

had collected one by one the players who would

accompany him throughout his journeys and who'd

recount his heroic deeds and exploits

in front of masses of potential followers.

     The character of the pieces that were performed

at the Podium (the First Station's name

for the makeshift stage around which the settlement

was established) underwent much alteration

under the new set of circumstances,

for there was no longer a greater accord that

needed to be taught how to remember their jokes,

tales and tunes, or from whom information

regarding the Life and its interpretation

was to be summoned.  Indeed, as one peruses

chronologically through the extant

pieces of the Middle Venue, the didactic

element seems more and more a gratuitous

gesture rather alien to the whole,

either appended as a ceremonious

concluding speech admonishing the audience

to avoid the mistakes and the pitfalls

of the anti-heroic protagonist or

inserted as a diversion to be performed

by apprentice players in between acts.

Finally it was fully eliminated,

although not without much bitter controversy

between those who felt that getting rid of

the didactic element in its entirety

would portend ominously for the theater

and those whose opinion prevailed who wished

to acknowledge the considerably altered

needs of the theater by eliminating

the archaic didactic element

that was felt by many to be superfluous.

     The agreement that the didactic pretenses

should be dropped proved to be a watershed.

Through a complex and quickly evolving series

of technical innovations, taboos, guidelines,

strictures and prohibitions, a thorough

theatricalization of life and manners

was instituted as if in a moment's breath

and breadth.  The station's New Breach Theater

exerted so much influence over how men

and women lived and promulgated a degree

of aestheticism so pervasive

in the streets and the homes of the new settlement

that it was often difficult for outsiders

to decide exactly when theater

was in session and when “life as it's really lived” –

though if you questioned a local on the issue

and attempted to determine whether

you were in conversation with a performer

or else with a person who wasn't currently

operating “in character,” you'd get

a condescending smirk, a shrug of the shoulders,

and a reiteration of the oft-spoken

cliché, “It's life, and Life is in the Play.”

[Next: If It Weren't for the Beasts]