"You whom we love, you do not see us, you do not
hear us…We are messengers who bring closeness to those who are distant. We are
messengers who bring the light to those who are in darkness. We are messengers who
bring the word to those who question. We are neither the light, nor the
message. We are the messengers. We are nothing.” (Far Away, So Close)
Wim Wenders’ angels look down at the busy
streets of Berlin from an impossible distance, perched on the shoulder of a
colossal statue whose head rests beyond the clouds. The lines above are from
the opening of Far Away, So Close, a
movie theoretically about angels, practically about our salvation through the
belief in the fantastical as it exists in the people we love.
Wenders, like me, is partial to very cool-looking
angels, in long, black coats, and dusters that catch the wind at every turn. There
is something obsessive about the way they listen to everyone’s thoughts in a
crowded library, on a bus, or in the street. The chorus of voices, a polyphony
of sorts, is the only connection between the inhabitants of the city.
Why am I talking about angels? Because angels
have the courage to love, and ever since I started working on this play, I’ve
been thinking about elemental emotions: love and hate, love and exile (is exile
an emotion?), love and its anatomy, its archaeology, its rhythms. It was Wim
Wenders who said, “Everything I loved, I’ve had to defend.” I understand him
completely. (Should Revision be
called A Defense?)
Here is my dilemma: since a love declaration
creates no sense of obligation, why aren’t more people confessing to it? Is it
the fear of ridicule, of vulnerability, or does it take less effort to be
indifferent? To hate?
I love the desert. I love the sea (parts one and
three of Revision). Saying it exposes
me to sandstorms and hurricanes. In other words, confessing could kill me. But
NOT confessing would kill me too. So the question is, how would I rather die:
telling the truth or lying?
In Q I
say “Every play is a hostage negotiation. Even if we survive at the end, we’re
never the same.” But every play is a love declaration as well. Does this mean
that every love declaration takes hostages? (And why does “a declaration of
love” and “a declaration of war” use the same noun? Should we call it a love
advisory instead?)
Remember Wenders’ angels. Now pause that
thought.
Think of Mallarme’s Livre – the book of books,
the project he worked on for years without ever truly explaining or finishing
it – an impossibility. A book to capture the nothing of the nothing that we
are, a book about the love of that restful, pulsating void.
Revision
terrifies me. It is my
play of plays (The Play) about
everything I love and have to defend. It is about the courage to confess to
loving impossible things, and impossible people, and never giving up on them.
What separates tragedy from melodrama? At times,
the absence of a door through which one can make a dignified exit.
I want my play to devastate. I want to have the
courage of angels in every sentence. I want to watch you watching
it, like Hamlet watched Claudius (though Hamlet asked Horatio to watch the king for him – why would
he do that? Delegate? Ah, how far we are from scopophilia…)
I think we are experiencing a different kind of
Fall – the Fall of language, tied to an inexplicable fear of sentiment, of contact,
which renders us speechless when it comes to caring. Oh, the vocabularies we
have for hate, for outrage, for malice. Not for affection (that I can say “I
love cheese” and “I love you” using the same verb is pitiful).
I am at an impasse. I say: never start a play
with a mission, with an agenda. To be relevant, one has to expose a detail, not
the universe. My dilemma: inside me a universe is raging and I don’t know how
to turn it into a casual occurrence.
I think I’m writing a manifesto. I’ve split open
a circumstance and words are pouring out. But a play is not an avalanche. It is
a controlled experiment, a place where patients are treated but not cured, the
safest and deadliest of quarantines.
I want you to be my eternal spectator. I want to live importantly so I can understand your relevance. I want to change the course of your destiny. I want the
world to go blind when you close your eyes.
...but if I said that to an audience, who would
ever come to the theatre?
I am the playwright. I am the messenger. To you,
I am nothing.
