In spite of the difficulties and frustrations
that petitioned us with great impatience
(and from quarters we hadn’t anticipated),
to our great relief the matter of a venue
was soon decided upon, and before
any controversy could begin to set in
as to basic questions of seating and décor,
there it was before us, as if summoned
into existence merely by our great desire
to locate one significant part of the whole,
one essential beam in the edifice
that was to house us, over which there would arise
no disagreement. But I should rather assert
that there we were with it around us, as
our world at this point was stage – all stage. When we stopped
to have a look around us, we suddenly found
each other lost in a neverending
pageantry of belated triumphs and early
defeats, of youth being taught by its own folly
and the wisdom of age veering into
decrepitude, of solitary posturings
and massy tableaus, of combat armed and unarmed,
of amours that were publicly sanctioned
and of the more crucial loves that were illicit.
The LA had taken into their youthful clutch
the difficult business of recruitment,
and would-be men and women of the theater
were turning up for immediate employment
in such large numbers that in a short while
all interest was lost in maintaining the old
distinctions between performer and spectator,
cast and crew, star and impresario.
It was much as if it were hoped that spectacles
would just sort of spring up of themselves on unknown
patches of floor space when the right talent
met at the right times and for the right purposes.
There were some who came to perform, some who desired
nothing more than to sit around and watch,
others who offered to help out with the settings
or tinker around with the gadgetry,
still others who hoped to divert the direction
that subplots took away from the general thrust
and in this shifty way to undermine
the very premises on which our whole affair
was believed to be based. It was impossible
to determine at a cursory glance
if the overall trend was in the direction
of sophistication, say, or integration,
or, conversely, more towards production-wide
disorganization, abject mis-management
or even non-management that was just as much
collective in nature as it was one
of personality and of the singular,
like persuasions of untold individuals.
Again, it was the elders among us
who wondered whether the whole thing could be sustained.
It’s true that time and time again the suggestion
was put forth that those of us who had yet
retained our wits mount a stage-coup and force the hand
of the one with the scrawl (“Scrawl”, as we now called him).
into the comforting, the tried and true
groove of “reaction,” as the LA were so quick
to label our simple desire for the older
distinctions and unities. “What can you recall
of your venerable unities,” they asked us,
“when you’re not even able to sing your own songs?”
Then came their demand to affiliate
the production with the schools they’d newly founded
in accordance with the plan to teach the elders
(as they had begun referring to us –
they would no longer hear of a “greater accord”)
how to sing our own songs, how to hum our own tunes,
and, most insultingly, how to laugh at
our own jokes. So the whole thing was to be given
a pedagogical thrust, and we would be forced
both to enact and to see enacted
the sad chronicle of our own enfeeblement.
Last, there was the blackmail the LA exerted
once they’d established for once and for all
that they had taken the general run of things
into their firm control. That is, they’d grant LA
membership and the youth that went with it
(whether imaginary, real or symbolic
they couldn’t say) on the condition that one pledged
one’s firm and unequivocal support
for the forward thrust and pulse of revolution,
as they fashioned it, and on the additional
condition that you shared from time to time
a ceremonious whiff of their precious herb –
which they called, simply, “Whiff”. (One of the absurd rules
to which you had to submit if you wished
to collect the privileges that came along
with joining the LA ranks was memorizing
the “One Hundred and Forty Names of Whiff,”
which you were obliged under oath not to repeat
to non-initiates but which were said to be
multi-syllabled and to employ sounds
that did not exist in our or any language…
I don’t believe that I ever learned the species
of arcanum that was fabricated
in order to arrive at such contrived nonsense.)
It was soon discovered to our own amusement
that truthfully this herb was nothing new;
we remembered it lying about certain groves
and hillocks that had lined the streets and avenues
before the Breach. It was highly likely,
in fact, that it had once been part of our diet.
It had absolutely no effect on any
former members of the greater accord.
But there was no point in attempting to convince
the Lesser Accord and the half-witted fledglings
that comprised its fast-growing membership.
For them it was the heaven-sent manna in which
they read their own innocence – which they would assert
with great volume and vociferousness
as more and more facts of the Breach became released.
[Next: The Song of Menahmen, Man of Men]