‘Heiner Mueller’s Hamletmachine, written in 1977, challenges everyone involved on many levels. In the first place, the play re-enacts one of the most canonical works in Western literature, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But how should the re-enactment take place? Should the characters appear in period costumes? Should there be a setting for them to inhabit? What about the machine element of the play? Beginning with the title and through to the end of the work, the play provokes many questions. I will argue that Mueller’s play constitutes an assault on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and all that it represents. The very desire to preserve Hamlet, the wish for any state to imagine itself in canonical terms, even the desires of the actors, writers, directors or audiences to participate in the staging of canonical works, all must be rethought in light of Hamletmachine. Yet, as the ending shows, the most revolutionary acts remain frozen or buried underwater.
‘The first character who appears is Hamlet, but in a profoundly deranged way. He doesn’t do anything, he just tells of his actions. The tension between acting and speaking throughout the play is extreme. In Hamlet`s opening monologue, the language itself is a patchwork of citations from various sources, some of which include nonsense sounds like “Blahblah.” This is no real Hamlet, but one composed of borrowed fragments from other works and events, authentically synthetic. As he tells it, Hamlet is attending his father’s funeral. But along the way he commits horrible acts of violence.
‘Some may show these actions, others just allude to them. In any case it is clear that Hamlet the character is angrily, fiercely attacking himself, his kingdom, his family and his role. The rottenness from Shakespeare`s Denmark has been intensified in Mueller`s version to the point of rampant, violent destruction. The combination of borrowed phrases, unspeakable acts and nonsense sounds drives the audience to question its participation. We submit to such an assault, at least in part, because of the thrill of witnessing the demolition. In Mueller`s work the idea of alienation from Brecht is twisted into carnage.
‘For all the chaos of each scene, the play is well organized into a five-scene structure. If there were action, each scene could be imagined as an act. Instead each scene is very static, with the speakers basically motionless. It is as if the scenes were tableaus, snapshots, or frozen moments in time. These frozen moments incorporate the articulation of highly dramatic action.
‘Ophelia appears in the second scene, and carries out the destruction of her role. The description she gives of her actions is just as violent as Hamlet`s. Seeking to break away from the chains of her role, she smashes the signs of her domesticity. By the end of the second scene, Ophelia has outdone Hamlet in twisting out of her accepting, subservient role. Now she rivals Hamlet in revolution. The movement from scene one to two shows Ophelia overcoming the role that Hamlet, her family, the state, and Western literature have foisted upon her. By the end of the second scene the play could be taken as a powerful statement in favour of violent, feminist revolution.
‘The third scene shows Hamlet and Ophelia together. Indeed, there is a rhythm to the sequence of the scenes: from Hamlet in one and Ophelia in two, to the two together in three, to Hamlet in four and Ophelia in five. The movement of the first two scenes offers a rising action to the encounter between the two in scene three.
‘Scene three adds another new dimension to the relationship between the two: Hamlet wants to change places with Ophelia. This is not just a role reversal, but involves a sex change and a complete reimagining. Hamlet wants to get out of his own skin, and to become Ophelia. It is a kind of colonization, invasion or takeover. In my view the third scene depicts the heightening of Hamlet`s frustrated desires. Ophelia remains aloof, only partially concerned.
‘As a result, Hamlet in scene four carries out the destruction of himself as a character, an actor, and even as a playwright. Enthralled by consumer society, but outraged by the remnants of the Lord`s Prayer and the failed hopes of the Communist revolution, Hamlet tries to step out of his role, tears up a picture of Heiner Mueller, whose initials H.M. match the abbreviated title of the play, and climbs into his armour from the past. Despite his noisy and threatening speech, he disarms himself and entombs himself in the armour. The fourth scene carries out the entombment of consumerism, Christianity and communism.
‘In scene five we see the confinement underwater of Ophelia. Surrounded by floating bits of ruined dreams, she is tied to a wheelchair while proclaiming violent resistance. The passage embodies the stagnation of feminist hopes of revolution. As Heiner Mueller suggested elsewhere he offers neither hope nor dope to his audiences. Instead there is a disturbing, surreal quiet that descends on the fantasies of both Hamlet and Ophelia. When the play was written, in the German Democratic Republic of the late 1970s, Mueller was criticized for his pessimism. This was not an emotion supported by the government at the time. The practitioners of Socialist Realism should write plays to encourage the masses to pursue their dream of a utopian future. But Mueller would not support that approach. Instead he challenges us to rethink our commitments and our traditions. As he assaults the canon, he questions us as well. It remains to be seen what we can make of his challenge.’ — Steven Taubeneck
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Further
Heiner Müller @ Wikipedia
The International Heiner Müller Society
Book: ‘Heiner Müller’s Democratic Theater’
Book: ‘The Cultural Politics of Heiner Müller’
Original translations of Heiner Müller’s plays, prose and poetry.
Heiner Muller, the Playwright And Social Critic, Dies at 66
From Bertolt Brecht to Heiner Müller
Heiner Müller’s Discovery of America
Diedrich Diederichsen on Heiner Müller
From Heiner Müller’s Death in Berlin to Christoph Schlingensief’s “Death” in Venice
Heiner Müller’s Political Theatre of Destruction
Heiner Müller und Einsturende Neubauten
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Extras
Heiner Müller – Interview: the function of the theatre (1989)
Heiner Müller – Gespräch & Werkzitate
1988 Heiner Goebbels / Heiner Müller “The Man In The Elevator”
_____
Productions
Production
Production
Production
Production
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Interview
from Der Spiegel
SPIEGEL: “What’s going on here is not unification but subjugation.” That’s a Heiner Müller sound bite from mid-July on German unity. Subjugation requires coercion. Are GDR citizens really being pressured into unification?
MÜLLER: Not at all. They wanted this unity and probably still do. It’s just that they imagined it differently. What’s happening now is economic subjugation.
SPIEGEL: How did GDR citizen Heiner Müller envision unification?
MÜLLER: It makes no sense to whine about some dream that was never fulfilled.
SPIEGEL: But you can describe it.
MÜLLER: That’s not so easy. I have always been regarded as a person who is directly interested in politics. But that’s nonsense. I am interested in writing and some other things, and politics is material, just like everything else.
[ . . . ]
SPIEGEL: Mr. Müller, you have always considered yourself a GDR writer, although you were only able to develop your talents in the West. What is the complex relationship between you and this state that is coming to an end?
MÜLLER: It’s real work for me to reflect on that now. I was raised in one dictatorship and grew into the next dictatorship, which started out as an anti-dictatorship with which I could identify. Very roughly speaking, I could also identify with Stalin. Stalin was the one who killed Hitler. After that, things became problematic. I was raised in this first dictatorship in a rather schizophrenic situation: Outside was “Heil Hitler!” and at home everything was okay. This tension emerged in a different way in the next dictatorship. That’s what is strange about it; I learned how to deal with it. I think it gave me a lot of experience as a writer and a lot of very contradictory material. Precisely this black foil of dictatorship and this broken or ambivalent relationship to the state was a movens, a motivation, for me to write.
I never doubted that this GDR existed only in dependence on the Soviet Union and that the population here lived under the status of a colonized people.
SPIEGEL: And for certain historical reasons you considered that appropriate?
MÜLLER: You can’t really say that, because I’m a writer, not a politician. I could work with it. Art has nothing to do with morality.
SPIEGEL: No, but there is also the person Heiner Müller.
MÜLLER: Only to a certain extent. The longer you write, the more the person is consumed. One point with regard to myself was this: What was useful for writing, totally void of morality and politics, was that we were also living in a Third World situation. Socialism in the GDR in its Stalinist form meant nothing more than the colonization of one’s own population. You can still see that today in the subway immediately. GDR citizens have a concealed glance. You can identify them right away as the people with the concealed glance. Even the children. It is the glance of the colonized.
SPIEGEL: Do you mean the situation of oppression helped you, it clarified things?
MÜLLER: There was greater experiential pressure than I could have had in Hamburg.
SPIEGEL: There is another clause to the Müller quotation we cited at the beginning of this interview. “We want to resist” the subjugation. How do you expect to resist in a situation in which German unity is long since a fait accompli?
MÜLLER: Let me give you an example. At the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Peter Ludwig – the great GDR patron – just had an argument with his museum directors, who decided: this GDR art emerged in an unjust system, it was painted in un-freedom [Unfreiheit]. Therefore, it belongs in the basement and is not allowed to be displayed. That trend exists here, too. Just a few days ago, I heard: GDR art will no longer be shown in GDR museums; it belongs in the basement.
SPIEGEL: So you mean resistance to getting plowed under?
MÜLLER: To the simple equation of culture or art or literature with the system in which it was created.
SPIEGEL: In your view, was there such a thing as a GDR culture?
MÜLLER: I don’t know. In literature there were certainly things that were relatively specific to what emerged in the GDR. But it was still written in German, and in the end there was a criterion for whether it was good German or not. In this respect there were never two literatures. Of course, both sides had trivial literature. The one here was state-run and the one there was commercial; that was the difference.
SPIEGEL: What do you view as GDR achievements worthy of preservation? And how should they be saved?
MÜLLER: If I only knew! For example, I was away for five days; I was in France or somewhere. There’s a bookstore in my building. In these five days the book display had changed beyond recognition. There were only DuMont travel guides and cookbooks on the shelves. It doesn’t have to be GDR books, but a lot of our publishers have published a lot of high-quality international works. None of that is possible anymore if they were printed in the GDR.
SPIEGEL: Because your people don’t want to buy it anymore?
MÜLLER: Of course. Sure. My resistance is to the quick assimilation.
SPIEGEL: Isn’t the resistance also a bit of a defiant reaction by an offended intellectual? [ . . . ]
MÜLLER: [ . . . ] I’m not offended.
SPIEGEL: But a lot of your artistic colleagues are, because the revolution ran right past them.
MÜLLER: Where to? I was rather skeptical from the outset. As soon as I hear the word “Volk,” I get leery. It isn’t my “Volk,” my people. I understood very well, especially in the fall of last year, why Brecht always insisted on saying “population” instead of “people.” A slogan like “We are one population,” of course, does not work. It doesn’t have any spark at all.
SPIEGEL: There was also the slogan: “We are a stupid people.”
MÜLLER: Yeah, I liked that. Even better was: “I am Volker.”* One banner read: “Wir sind das Volk” [“We are the people”], and next to it someone wrote, “I am Volker.” We will need the guy who wrote that. We have to strengthen those forces.
But back to the revolution. I don’t think we should look at it so emotionally, so heroically. What really happened there was that a government went bankrupt. Well, the credit chains break at the weakest link, just like other chains.
SPIEGEL: But maybe we shouldn’t look at it all that unemotionally either. A real fortress has been razed. It cannot just be ridiculed with an “I am Volker.”
MÜLLER: It might sound a bit distant, but this Wende, this turning point, or this so-called turning point, came at least five years too late. In other words, the substance of GDR society had already been hollowed out. It was nothing but a zombie. The opening of the border on November 9, 1989, came too early. It was an occupational accident. No one was prepared for it. Now it’s all just unity pabulum. And the problem is that the people all got caught up in this revolutionary delirium, which was not a beer delirium at first. And now everything is going so fast that they’re quickly being torn apart into interest groups. My dream would have been to have left time for this unification and to approach it gradually. I am rather certain that the tempo of this unification is being determined by the CDU’s interest in reelection.
SPIEGEL: But also by the people’s interest in getting Deutschmarks as quickly as possible.
MÜLLER: Yes. They didn’t know what they were getting with it. They did not reckon with getting far fewer Deutschmarks in comparison with the people in the Federal Republic.
SPIEGEL: Dreams of paradise in times of revolution are always like that.
MÜLLER: And now these illusions are breaking down. Now the lethargy is taking over.
SPIEGEL: Do you think that a new GDR consciousness will emerge, a nostalgia?
MÜLLER: No, not in the next five years. What will emerge are pogroms, outbreaks of violence, aggression on the streets and everywhere. That will increase.
SPIEGEL: You said that this turning point, the Wende, came five years too late. Do I sense a bit of self-criticism in that? If anyone could have precipitated it five years ago, it would have been the intellectuals.
MÜLLER: No, that is not at all the case.
SPIEGEL: Why not?
MÜLLER: I already said what I thought five or ten years ago – here and, of course, also in the West. But I played the role of the clown, the fool.
SPIEGEL: Okay, so no self-criticism, but criticism of your colleagues?
MÜLLER: Maybe also of myself. But it makes no sense to play the Winkelried.* There were always discussions on literature, that a writer has to be a communist first and a writer second. I would say: I am a writer first and a hero second.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Müller, are you a communist?
MÜLLER: I never claimed to be a communist because I find it inappropriate to say that.
[ . . . ]
SPIEGEL: And you still could live with communism?
MÜLLER: Yes. I was interested in the tragedy of this socialism. Now it looks like a farce. That is the last phase. But it was a tragedy.
SPIEGEL: Isn’t it an aesthetically questionable standpoint to say you love tragedies even if they are carried out on the backs of other people?
MÜLLER: Aesthetically questionable? What does Der Spiegel live from? It’s not only a problem of art and politics.
[ . . . ]
SPIEGEL: If intellectuals, if writers were so despised by the Communist Party since the time of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, then why did they throw themselves so masochistically at its heirs?
MÜLLER: Of course an artist needs to have a conception of a world that is different from the given or existing one. Otherwise I think it’s impossible to make art. And so there was this final religion of the twentieth century, the communist utopia. It is no coincidence: There are not many great writers or artists who actively promoted Nazism. But incredible numbers of them in all the countries of the world campaigned for this communist utopia.
SPIEGEL: But now that is past, since socialism is over with. [ . . . ]
MÜLLER: [ . . . ] but it isn’t over with. The attempt to refute Marx is over. Marx said this simple sentence: the attempt to build socialism or a socialist structure on the basis of an economy of scarcity will end in the same old shit. That’s what we’re experiencing now.
SPIEGEL: Do you think socialism has a future?
MÜLLER: Yes.
SPIEGEL: And where is it?
MÜLLER: It lies in the simple fact that capitalism does not have a solution for the problems of the world.
[ . . . ]
___
Book
Heiner Müller Hamlet-Machine and Other Texts for the Stage
PAJ Publications
‘This best-selling volume contains several of the German author’s most controversial dramas, in which he radically questions how culture, myth, art, and social relations create history. Includes: Hamletmachine, Correction, The Task, Quartet, Despoiled Shore, and Gundling’s Life. One of the most original theatrical minds of our time, Müller, who resided in East Berlin before his death in 1995, was a frequent collaborator of Robert Wilson.’ — PAJ
Excerpt
Hamletmachine
1
Family Album
I was Hamlet. I stood at the coast and spoke with the surf BLABLA, behind me the ruins of Europe. The bells rang in the state funeral, murderer and widow a pair, the council in goose-step behind the coffin of the High Cadaver, howling in poorly paid grief WHOSE IS THE CORPSE IN THE CORPSE TRAIN/ FOR WHOM IS HEARD THIS LAMENTING STRAIN/ THE CORPSE IS OF A GREAT/ GIVER OF ESTATE the framework of the people, work of his statecraft HE WAS A MAN TOOK THEM ALL FOR ALL. I stopped the funeral train, pried open the casket with my sword which broke the blade, with the blunt remainder I succeeded and distributed my dead maker FLESH AND FLESH GLADLY JOIN TOGETHER before the surrounding guise of misery. The grief turned to rejoicing, the rejoicing into smacking, on top of the empty casket the murderer mounted the widow SHOULD I HELP YOU UP UNCLE OPEN YOUR LEGS MAMA. I laid on the ground and heard the world turning her rounds in step with the decay.
I’M GOOD HAMLET GI’ME A CAUSE FOR GRIEF*
AH THE WHOLE GLOBE FOR A REAL SORROW*
RICHARD THE THIRD I THE PRINCEKILLING KING*
OH MY PEOPLE WHAT HAVE I DONE UNTO THEE*
LIKE A HUNCHBACK I DRAG MY HEAVY BRAIN
SECOND CLOWN IN THE SPRING OF COMMUNISM
SOMETHING IS ROTTEN IN THIS AGE OF HOPE*
LET’S DELVE IN EARTH AND BLOW HER AT THE MOON*
Here comes the ghost that made me, the axe still in the skull. You can keep your hat on, I know you’ve got one hole too many. I would my mother had one too few when you were in the flesh: I’d have been spared. Women should be sewn shut, a world without mothers. We could slaughter each other in peace, and with a bit of confidence, if life becomes too long for us or our throats too tight for our screams. What do you want from me? Is one state funeral not enough for you, old deadbeat? Do you have no blood on your shoes? What do I care about your corpse? Be happy that the handle is sticking out; perhaps you’ll go to heaven. What are you waiting for? The cocks have been slaughtered. Morning is cancelled.
SHALL I
BECAUSE IT’S CUSTOMARY STICK A PIECE OF IRON IN THE NEAREST FLESH OR THE NEXT NEAREST
TO LATCH ONTO IT SINCE THE WORLD IS SPINNING LORD BREAK MY NECK WHEN I FALL FROM
AN ALEHOUSE BENCH
Enter Horatio. Confidant of my thoughts so full of blood since morning is curtained by the empty sky. YOU COME TOO LATE MY FRIEND FOR YOUR PAYCHECK/ NO SPACE FOR YOU IN MY TRAGEDY PLAY. Horatio, do you know me? Are you my friend, Horatio? If you know me, how can you be my friend? Do you want to play Polonius, who wants to sleep with his daughter, the charming Ophelia, she comes on her cue line, see how she shakes her ass, a tragic role. HoratioPolonius. I knew you were an actor. I am too, I play Hamlet. Denmark is a prison, between us grows a wall. Look at what’s growing out of the wall. Exit Polonius. My mother the bride. Her breasts a bed of roses, her womb a nest of snakes. Have you forgotten your text, Mama? I’ll prompt: WASH THE MURDER OFF YOUR FACE MY PRINCE/ AND MAKE EYES AT THE NEW DENMARK. I’ll make you into a virgin again, Mother, so that the king can have a bloody wedding. THE MOTHER’S WOMB IS NOT A ONEWAY STREET. Now, I tie your hands behind your back with your bridal veil since I’m disgusted by your embrace. Now, I tear apart the wedding dress. Now you must scream. Now I smear the rags of your wedding dress with the earth my Father has become, with the rags your face your belly your breasts. Now, I take you, my mother, in his, my father’s invisible tracks. I strangle your scream with my lips. Do you recognize the fruit of your body? Now go to your wedding, whore, bright in the Danish sun which shines on the living and the dead. I want to stuff the corpse in the toilet so that the palace chokes in kingly shit. Then let me eat your heart, Ophelia, which cries my tears.
2
THE EUROPE OF WOMAN
Enormous room.* Ophelia. Her heart is a clock.
OPHELIA [CHORUS/HAMLET]
I am Ophelia. The one the river didn’t keep. The woman at the gallows The woman with sliced arteries The woman with the overdose SNOW ON HER LIPS The woman with her head in the gas oven. Yesterday I stopped killing myself. I am alone with my breasts my thighs my womb. I smash the instruments of my imprisonment the chair the table the bed. I destroy the battlefield that was my home. I rip open the doors so the wind can come in and the cries of the world. I smash the window. With my bloody hands I tear the photographs of the men I loved who used me on the bed on the table on the chair on the floor. I set fire to my prison. I throw my clothes into the fire. I unearth the clock that was my heart from my breast. I go onto the street dressed in my blood.
3
SCHERZO
University of the dead. Whispers and murmurs. From out of their gravestones (lecterns) the dead philosophers throw their books at Hamlet. Gallery (ballet) of dead women. The woman at the rope The woman with the sliced arteries, etc. Hamlet regards them with the attitude of a museum (theater) visitor. The dead women rip the clothing from his body. From an upright coffin with the inscription HAMLET 1 step Claudius and, dressed and painted like a whore, Ophelia. Striptease by Ophelia.
OPHELIA
Do you want to eat my heart, Hamlet. Laughs.
HAMLET hands in front of his face: I want to be a woman.
Hamlet puts on Ophelia’s clothes. Ophelia paints a whore’s mask for him, Claudius,
now Hamlet’s father, laughs without a sound, Ophelia blows Hamlet a kiss and steps back into the coffin with Claudius/Hamlet Father. Hamlet in whore’s pose. An angel, his face on the back of his head: Horatio. He dances with Hamlet.
VOICE(S) from the coffin:
What you killed you should also love.
The dance becomes quicker and wilder. Laughter from the casket. On a swing, a madonna with breast cancer/crab. Horatio opens an umbrella, embraces Hamlet. Freeze in the embrace under the umbrella. The breast cancer radiates like a sun.
4
PEST IN BUDA BATTLE FOR GREENLAND
Room 2, destroyed by Ophelia. Empty armor, axe in the helmet.
HAMLET
The oven smokes in peaceless October.
A BAD COLD HE HAD OF IT JUST THE WORST TIME*
JUST THE WORST TIME OF THE YEAR FOR A REVOLUTION*
Cement in bloom goes through the suburbs
Doctor Zhivago weeps
For his wolves
SOMETIMES IN WINTER THEY CAME INTO THE VILLAGE AND MANGLED A FARMER
Takes off mask and costume.
HAMLET ACTOR
I am not Hamlet. I don’t play a role anymore. My words have nothing more to tell me. My thoughts suck the blood out of the images. My drama is cancelled. Behind me the set is being built. By people my drama doesn’t interest, for people it doesn’t concern. It doesn’t interest me anymore either. I won’t play along anymore. Unnoticed by the Hamlet Actor, stagehands arrange a refrigerator and three television sets. Sounds of the refrigerator. Three television programs without sound. The set is a monument. It depicts a man who made history, a hundred times enlarged. The petrifaction of a hope. His name is interchangeable. The hope didn’t come true. The monument lies on the ground, razed by those who succeeded him in power three years after the state funeral of the hated and worshipped one. The stone is inhabited. In the spacious nose- and ear- holes, creases of skin and uniform of the smashed statue dwells the poor population of the metropolis. The uprising comes at an appropriate time after the collapse of the monument. My drama, if it would still take place, would happen in the time of the uprising. The uprising starts as a stroll. Against traffic regulation, during working hours.
The street belongs to the pedestrians. Here and there, a car is turned over. Nightmare of a knife-thrower: slow drive down a one-way street to an irrevocable parking space surrounded by armed pedestrians. Policemen, if they stood in the way, are swept to the roadside. When the train nears the government district it is stopped by a police line. Groups form, out of which speakers arise. On the balcony of a government building a man in badly fitting clothes appears and begins to speak. When the first stone hits him, here treats behind the double doors of the bullet-proof glass. The call for more freedom becomes the cry for the collapse of the government. They start to disarm the police, storm two, three buildings, a prison a police station an office of the secret police, hang a dozen of the rulers’ henchmen by their feet, the government appoints troops, tanks. My place, if my drama would still take place, would be on both sides of the front, between the fronts, beyond them. I stand in the sweaty stench of the crowd and throw rocks at the police soldiers tanks bulletproof glass. I look through the double doors of bullet-proof glass at the crowd moving forward and smell the sweat of my fear. Choked by nausea, I shake my fist at myself who stands behind the bullet-proof glass. Shaken by fright and contempt, I see myself in the oncoming mass, foaming at the mouth, shaking my fist at myself. I hang up my uniformed flesh by my feet. I am the soldier in the gun-turret, my head is empty under the helmet, the scream choked under the chains. I am the typewriter. I tie the noose when the ringleaders are hanged, I pull away the stool, I break my own neck. I am my own prisoner. I feed the computer my data. My roles are spit and spittoon knife and wound tooth and throat neck and rope. I am the databank. Bleeding in the crowd. Breathing again behind the double doors. Secreting word slime into my soundproof speech bubble over the battle. My drama didn’t happen. The script has been lost. The actors hung up their faces on the nails in the dressing room. In his box the prompter festers. The stuffed corpses in the house don’t move a hand. I go home and kill time, at one/with my undivided self.
Television the daily nausea Nausea
At prefabricated babble
At decreed cheerfulness
How do you spell GEMÜTLICHKEIT
Give us this day our daily murder
For thine is the nothingness Nausea
At the lies that are believed
By the liars and no one else Nausea
At the lies that are believed Nausea
At the marked faces of the manipulators
By their struggle for the positions votes bank accounts
Nausea a scythed chariot with sparkling points.
I go through streets supermarkets faces
With the scars from the consumer battle poverty
Without dignity poverty without dignity
Of the knife the knuckles the fist
The humiliated bodies of women
Hope of generations
Stifled n blood cowardice ignorance
Laughter from dead bellies
Hail COCA COLA
A kingdom
For a murderer
I WAS MACBETH
THE KING OFFERED ME HIS THIRD CONCUBINE
I KNEW EVERY BIRTHMARK ON HER HIPS RASKOLNIKOV AT HEART UNDER THE ONLY COAT THE AXE FOR THE/ONLY/SKULL OF THE PAWNBROKER
In the loneliness of the airports I breathe again I am
A privileged person My nausea Is a privilege
Sheltered by walls
Barbed wire prison
Photograph of the author.
I don’t want to eat drink breathe love a woman a man a child an animal anymore.
I don’t want to die anymore. I don’t want to kill anymore.
Tearing of the author’s photograph.
I break open my sealed up flesh. I want to live in my veins, in the marrow of my bones, in the labyrinth of my skull. I retreat into my intestines. I take a seat in my shit, my blood. Somewhere bodies are being broken so I can live in my shit. Somewhere bodies are opened so I can be alone with my blood. My thoughts are lesions in my brain. My brain is a scar. I want to be a machine. Arms to grab legs to go no pain no thoughts.
Black television screen. Blood from the refrigerator. Three naked women. Marx Lenin Mao. Speaking at the same time, each in their own language, the text THE MAINPOINT IS TO OVERTHROW ALL EXISTING CONDITIONS… Hamlet Actor puts on costume and mask.
HAMLET PRINCE OF DANES AND MAGGOT’S GRUB
STUMBLING HOLE TO HOLE AND AT THE LAST
TOO LISTLESS AT HIS BACK THE GHOST THAT MADE
HIM GREEN AS OPHELIA’S FLESH IN CHILDBED
AND SHORT BEFORE THIRD CROW A FOOL TEARS UP
THE JESTER’S CAPE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS
A HEAVY BLOODHOUND CRAWLS INTO THE ARMOR
Steps into the armor, splits the heads of Marx Lenin Mao with the axe. Snow. Ice Age.
5
FIERCELY AWAITING/MILLENIA/IN THE FEARFUL ARMOR Deep sea. Ophelia in a wheelchair. Fish debris corpses and corpse pieces go by.
OPHELIA
While two men in lab coats wrap her and the wheelchair from bottom to top in gauze bandages.
Here speaks Electra. In the heart of darkness. Under the sun of torture. To the cities of the world. In the name of the victims. I reject all of the semen that I received. I turn the milk of my breasts into deadly poison. I take back the world that I bore. I suffocate the world that I bore between my thighs. I bury it in my shame. Down with the joy of submission. Long live hate, contempt, rebellion, death. When she walks through your bedrooms carrying butcher knives you’ll know the truth.
Exit men. Ophelia remains on stage motionless in the white wrapping.
*
p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, My pleasure, Ben, of course, and thanks a bunch. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you, David. I think/hope the links in the post will tell the Beavers/ Markopoulos story if anyone wants to pursue it. Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein shares a link to Gregory Markopoulos’s (aka Robert Beavers’s longtime partner) film ‘Twice a man’ if you’re interested. Here. ** Steve Erickson, HI. The color grading is finished. I’ll give it a final look this morning before we make the end credits. That and the current sound mix are only for the festival submission versions of the film. We’ll do more thorough and intricate work prior to the actual screenings as soon as we get some funds. Enjoy the NYFF screenings, lucky you. Mm, I don’t think I know Creton’s Films? I feel like I should. I’ll do a hunt, thanks, Steve. Everyone, Mr. Erickson has a small slew of new reviews for you to pore over, and they are … his September roundup for Gay City News, on Jlin and the Brothers Osborne here, and his review of Underscores’ Wallsocket LP here. ** Jose, Hi, Jose! Awesome to get to meet you. Man, like I said yesterday, I’m so totally blown away by the zine. You guys did just magnificent work. I’m really touched and surprised and excited. Thank you so extremely much. I hope you nail those two new zines as magnificently in your tight timeframe, and no doubt you will. Araki’s films are pretty well liked here, so I think the restorations will show up here in Paris. I have to remember to peel my eyes. I hope all’s great with you. I hope I’ll get to meet when I get in LA for Halloween! Take care. ** 2Moody, Hi. Cool. Happy to add to your queue. If your special powers are real, I have so many things I’d love you to complain about. I don’t know where to start. It’s raining and yum here. ‘PGL’ will definitely wean you off bright color schemes and fast-moving/ tangled-up melodrama, or maybe make you long for them, ha ha. With very rare exceptions, Zac and I only work with non-actors. One of the boys in ‘PGL’ has become a fairly well known French rapper since we shot the film. I’m sure I must’ve thrown up on a ride as a kid, but I think I’m blocking that out. Generally, I just get very nauseous in a heartbeat. Yes, gravitron rides are way up there in the ‘never for me’ list. The Indiana Jones ride is seriously great, yes. Maybe you’d like ‘Radiator Springs’ at California Adventure, it’s pretty great. No, I don’t scream. Like you, I giggle uncontrollably when a ride panics me. I can count the times I’ve been scared in a haunted house on one hand, on one finger maybe. No, I walk through them very slowly and attentively, examining each prop and trick and piece of decor like they’re in a museum or something. The guards are always yelling me at move along. I think I would be a great amusement park ride critic. Back when I wrote reviews and journalism a lot, I was always trying to talk the magazines into letting me write features or even reviews of amusement park-related stuff, but no interest. It sucked. One of them, this defunct but kind of great magazine called Nest, let me write a big feature on what was, at that time, the world’s greatest haunted house: Bob & Dave’s Spooky House. But that was it. Did today obey you, I hope? ** Corey Heiferman, Oh, no, thank you, of course. Wow, that video you linked to. Scary to love. Everyone, If you want to know how to instantly calm a grumpy hedgehog, Corey has you covered here. Well, knowing about the high altitude, etc. does help me imagine a journey there at the appointed time. I’ll write it in my to-do list. In pencil, for now. Outgoing and flirtatious are impossible states to warn you against embodying. You sound perky, good. Our deadline this week is to finish a viewable cut of the film that we’re sufficiently happy and proud of because a festival’s deadline is imminent, and a programer at that festival expressed interest in us submitting it, and it’s a very good festival. After that we’ll keep working on the film. The next deadline is in early November. Thanks for asking, pal. ** Right. The novelist and d.l. Jeff Jackson recently requested that I do a post about the late visionary theater artist Heiner Müller, and here’s that post about probably Müller’s most famous work. Please give it your kind attentiveness. See you tomorrow.
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