bad theatre

It rained on St Swithin’s day, and it’s still raining dammit. It feels interminable, this slate sky, these misted windows. And this is summer ... All it needs is for the odd cloud-borne fish to plop onto the sodden grass outside and writhe there, silver-scaled and shiney-eyed. Or a plummeting toad to bounce off the car bonnet, kerplonk, then hop off drunkenly into the undergrowth. Or a hail-stone the size of a basketball to crash through the gooseberries. Oh God. I cradle a cup of tea in both hands and my glasses steam up.

In the newspaper there’s a photograph of a small orange plane dumping water on forest fires in the outskirts of Athens. Great grey plumes of smoke behind the Akropolis. Much of the stone structure itself is propped up by scaffolding. I check the weather in Athens: 32 degrees and sunny. It’s 41 and sunny in Basra.

She left after breakfast in her waterproofs, with rucksack and flask, and that smile. ‘I’m going to walk the tidal line’, she said. ‘To get away from bad theatre. If you can, go out for a walk to the river. I’ll be downstream. Send me a message’. Then off into the rain, waving through the car window, her hand the same speed as the windscreen wipers. For a moment it looked like the whole car was waving.

The TV says: ‘But shaving cuts hairs so they grow back prickley’.

Where would we go if the rain just kept on and on, way past the 40 days and 40 nights, and the river burst its banks and the flood waters rose ever higher? Seeping in through the porch, the doors, then the windows. Eventually a pool of cold brown soup lapping through the living room and the kitchen, bearing DVD cases, books, shoes, clothes, photographs, TV, plastic bags, wooden spatulas, herb containers, plant pots, a frisbee. What would we take with us?

A sudden gust outside, the trees spasm and an unripe apple drops on to the car roof with a muffled ding. In a flash the image of a staring toad lurches into my mind, then it’s gone. But something of its malevolent gaze and clammy green remains. This weather is creeping into my psyche, leaving its moist fingerprints on every surface.

Sometimes I grow weary of the stories my cortex hums to me.

My mobile beeps. A text message sent up river, against the current: “There is no drama out here where sea and sky are equal – that is a human thing: out here it just is. Love, Ponytrekker”

I sit indoors in my raincoat and try to imagine her out there at the estuary, taking the ferry across the river, setting out upstream. What does she see? Tussocks of marram grass on the dunes. Perhaps the veined purple of the stinking iris. Ragwort. Knapweed. If she’s really lucky, she’ll spot the bleached pink of the pyramidal orchid. And then on the mud flats, who knows, a curlew, oystercatchers, maybe a lapwing or a ringed plover. But this won’t be a day for butterflies, that’s for sure: little chance of witnessing the flashing dance of the marbled whites, the blues, the browns, the painted ladies. The painted ladies ... Black and white tips, orange, red flashes, tiny brown furry body. I google ‘painted lady’, and up she pops. ‘Vanessa cardui’, from the family ‘Nymphalidae’, the brush-footed butterflies. I read that: “when an adult emerges from the split chrysalis, it hangs upside down and pumps blood into its four wings, inflating them. Then it waits for its delicate wings to dry’. With its 2 and a half inch wingspan, it can fly within a few hours. It can mate within a week. Its antennae can see a much wider range of colours than humans. It has taste sensors on its legs. It only lives for about two weeks.

The TV says: ‘Bear in mind with birds that lay lots of eggs, some don’t work’.

Two weeks…

Then another text message, which exposes the inadequacy of my imaginings, and the inaccuracy of my projections of ‘here’ onto ‘there’. She writes: ‘Horseflies and butterflies everywhere. Humid hot sun – I shed my coat. Field of ruined potatoes against red poppies. The river thick and full, I descend towards tidal road with sweaty mane. Love, Packhorse’.

She is riding off bad theatre. And this spurs me on to go to the river. Despite the rain. Because of the rain. I want to connect, somehow. To respond. But with a … different technology. If water is an effective conductor of sound, I say to myself, perhaps I could speak into the river. Or whisper. Or even sing. Maybe… Imagine. Crouched down at the river’s edge, face lowered just above the water. Breathe in, face down, breathe out, release. Let the sounds bounce their way around the topography of the riverbed to the sea. To her. Yes.

The TV says: ‘Relieves all kinds of itching – FAST’.

On the way to the river, rehearsing what I might say, I pass a few muffled souls, heads down and leaning into the wind. A small bright-eyed boy in a push chair outside the newsagent’s sing-speaks one word over and over again through his rain-streaked plastic screen: ’Waindoggies … waindoggies …’ I stop by the underpass to wipe my glasses, and just catch the blur of a passing train on the bridge overhead. In its wake, the wind in the trees sounds like the sea.

As if on cue, another text message. She writes: ‘Had to scramble through undergrowth, scratched fetlocks but full of spirit. Passed sublime wheatfield, soft horizon, soft heads. Passed soft cows, soft horse noses in distance. Love, Horsewhisperer’.

I choose a spot under the horse chestnuts at the water’s edge, check that no one else is around, then drop down to my knees. The water is a peaty gold and alive with light. It already carries infinite swarms of tiny shimmering flecks …

(‘Bad theatre’, invited story for Barbara Campbell’s online writing / durational performance project 1001 Nights Cast, 17 July 2007: performed live 21.10 GMT, archived online as no. 757, http://www.1001.net.au -
© David Williams)

shuttle 18: zoning

'When there is enough out-of-placeness in the world, nothing is out of place' (Don DeLillo, Mao II)

'Physical space is vital to the type of testing and training [required by a hi-tech military force]. A single open-air test range requires nearly two million acres of open land. The Southwest is the only region of the country that offers land of this size, as well as air and sea space needed for other kinds of testing. The Southwest offers over 335 million acres of federally owned land. Over 490 thousand square miles of airspace is available in the Southwest, and 484 thousand square miles of sea are open for training activities. This land can be used without the interference from civilians or substantial electromagnetic interference - both of which are a problem in the rest of the country' ('Southwest Range Complex', GlobalSecurity.org)
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The Zone

'Tremors from the future can be felt throughout Stalker. In less than a decade Professor's summary of how the Zone came into existence had taken on the aura of a premonition fulfilled, and Stalker acquired yet another dimension of suggestiveness: in its foreshadowing of the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl, in Ukraine. Tarkovsky was not only a visionary, poet and mystic - he was also a prophet (of a future that now lies in the past).

The damaged reactor and much of the radioactive material were sealed in a huge concrete 'sarcophagus'. Nearby towns such as Pripyat were evacuated and a thirty-kilometre zone of exclusion was established around the plant. Like Stalker's child ... large numbers of the children of parents who lived near Chernobyl had birth defects.

After the evacuation the Zone of Exclusion was littered with the rusting remains of vehicles that had been used as part of the emergency clean-up. Plants stitched the empty roads and cracked concrete. Trees thrust through the warped floors of derelict buildings. Leaves changed shape. Vegetation clambered up the crumbling walls of abandoned homes.

Photographs taken by Robert Polidori of Pripyat and Chernobyl in 2001 (and collected in his book Zones of Exclusion) look like stills from a retrospective location shoot from the set of Stalker (1). Except it might not be quite as simple as Polidori and others documenting a world which had come to resemble a film made thirty years earlier. It could be that the photographers' aesthetic - their tacit sense of what they were looking for - was partly formed by Stalker, so that the film had helped generate and shape the observed reality that succeeded it.

Rumours began to circulate that within the Zone there was another place (in any magical realm there is always a deeper recess or chamber of more powerful magic) where your wishes could come true. There you have it. In the most concise form imaginable, Professor has outlined the birth of a myth and religion: a place where something may or may not have happened; a place with a power that was intensified - possibly even created - by being forbidden.

That's certainly the view of another professor, good old Slavoj Zizek, who reckons that the cordoning off is the defining aspect of the Zone: "What confers on it the aura of mystery is the Limit itself, i.e. the fact that the Zone is designated as inaccessible, as prohibited". In a classic Zizekian bit of reverse dialectics, "the Zone is not prohibited because it has certain properties which are 'too strong' for our everyday sense of reality; it displays these properties because it is posited as prohibited. What comes first is the formal gesture of excluding a part of the real from our everyday reality and of proclaiming it the prohibited Zone"'.
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(1) (footnote): 'Rather different but even more extraordinary documentary corroboration of the existence of some kind of Zone is provided by Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen in his book Satellites (2006), particularly the images from the so-called spacecraft crash zone in Kazakhstan and just across the border in the Altai Republic of Russia. The debris that regularly came crashing from space gave rise to a thriving unofficial business here - in spite of the risks - in scrap and salvage. Bendiksen's most famous - and beautiful - photograph shows two villagers atop the dented remains of a spacecraft or satellite in the midst of an idyllic green landscape and blue sky, all snow-blurred by the wings of thousands of white butterflies'.

Extract from Geoff Dyer's recent book about Tarkovsky's film Stalker - Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room, Edinburgh & London: Canongate, 2012, 74-77
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Photos (from the top): Nellis Air Force Base perimeter signs, Nevada; Robert Polidori, 'Unit 4 control room, Chernobyl', 2001; Jonas Bendiksen, 'Spaceship Junkyard', Altai Territory, Russia, 2000; declassified photograph of remnants of a crashed titanium A-12 spy plane from Groom Lake/Area 51, Nevada, scattered on the ground near Wendover, Utah, 1963

For the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) website and database, an invaluable resource 'dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived', see here

For an earlier post about Nevada nuclear tests in the late 1950s, Elvis, Las Vegas etc, see 'Plumbbob' here

For an earlier post about Chernobyl & Pripyat, nuclear waste, 'toxic tourism' etc, see 'A new fire (unknown fields)' here

For a sequence of three earlier posts about waste, see 'Underhistory' here, here and here

For cheerfully apocalyptic driving music, 'The man comes around' by Johnny Cash, listen here

instar

'People thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle.In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who "knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay". But the butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is psyche, the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming ... The process of transformation consists mostly of decay and then of this crisis when emergence from what came before must be total and abrupt'. (Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006, 81-3)













'But the changes in a butterfly's life are not always so dramatic. The strange resonant word instar describes the stage between two successive molts, for as it grows, a caterpillar, like a snake ... splits its skin again and again, each stage an instar. It remains a caterpillar as it goes through these molts, but no longer one in the same skin. There are rituals marking such splits, graduations, indoctrinations, ceremonies of change, though most changes proceed without such clear and encouraging recognition. Instar implies something both celestial and ingrown, something heavenly and disastrous, and perhaps change is commonly like that, a buried star, oscillating between near and far'. (Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 83).

All photos from the Butterfly Farm at Buckfastleigh, Devon
© David Williams 2008