The Master of Secrets

In my eternal love of paradoxes, I discovered the following correspondence: the opacity of things makes me think of their transparency. Saying “the opacity of things” makes me think of Foucault’s badly translated The Order of Things (which should be The Words and the Things, but who am I to quarrel with translators?)

The Order of Things makes me think of the List as an organizing principle, which makes me think of Borges’ ridiculous list of impossible animals, whose absurd, giggly nature triggers Foucault’s book (or, at least, the impulse behind it). Borges’ list presents animals divided into: “(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.” Foucault laughs all the way to the printing press. He says: “In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

One great leap. Revision is that leap and I, the leaper, am contemplating the abyss underneath while making memory lists.

Revision is about superimposed images (personalities) and transparency (opacity). Me and the girl, me and the desert man, the sea monster to whom I tell my story. Visually, on stage, the concept is simple. I talk to the man in the lighting booth (who never answers). I coincide with the girl (who never speaks).The girl wearing her Victorian tuxedo jacket, perfectly tailored, turns her back to the audience to regard an image on the screen (I am very fond of the word “regard” because it implies looking, the gaze, but also the admiration – “in high regard” – one has for what one is looking at. The look and the looked at exchange a mutually appreciative glance).

On the back of the girl’s jacket, a projection: the puppet-like, miniature image of herself. As an all-encompassing repertory of images (my own), the girl contains an image of herself. At some point she emerges from the fort (a colossally tall fort – possibly suspended from the lighting rig…how would we accomplish this in performance?) with a doll which is a replica of herself (and, indirectly of me). Superimposition. A duplication ad infinitum. Transparency.

What is the girl looking at, on the screen/scrim? As a transition to Part III, The Sea, she’s looking at a ship of fools made of the sea (A Magritte image). A ghost ship made of the matter it comes in contact with – water. A chameleon ship, then. A shipwreck, a ghost depository. We carry our own ghosts on our backs. Looking forward, the girl is looking back. The look, the regard, is a revision of the real.

The image of the girl coincides with the image of the ship, the way the man coincides with the monster in Part III, but also in The Tempest, where Caliban’s position (the way he is perceived, regarded) changes to the point of ambiguity. This and the quest are the only two motifs that interest me. Yes, I am shallow and greedy, and from each text, which is a system of communication plugged into a larger system of communication (the Library, the World), I only take what interests me at the moment. I am told that is superficial. Okay, then. I am superficial.

(Technical parenthesis: in medieval drama a Master of Secrets was responsible for something that would translate roughly to special effects today. For the Greeks, the god in the machine was a problem-solver. Put the two terms together and you get…the modern Tech Director, the god from the machine, the Master of all Secrets)

Yesterday, over the course of hours of conversation (why can’t I have brief exchanges with this man?), I told the Master of Secrets about my vocabulary deficiencies which point to larger, systemic deficiencies. I have no vocabulary for the stage, not in the transplant language I’ve been practicing, not in English. I know what I want, I understand what I see, I see simultaneously, inside my head and on stage, but I have no words for the lighting I want, for the stage paraphernalia, for anything more complex than the division of stage areas. Why? Because at the moment of my forking paths, when I chose English over Theatre as a graduate degree, I abandoned everything in favor of language and writing, determined to never sound like an interloper who writes in a borrowed language, on borrowed time. This possession (appropriation) took all my energy, all my devotion. And so I’ve worked for decades staging plays here, strangely, without ever having the slightest difficulty with tech guys, but also without the slightest trace of technical theatre terminology. My confession did not bring the relief I expected. At some point, we all disappoint.

(A note: I confess everything to the man in the lighting booth not because I find him intimidating – such level of imagination and professionalism is to be applauded, not feared – but because his complete control of the production’s technical aspects gives me the courage to confess. In other words: to be in good hands, one needs to inform “the hands” of the precise nature of the cargo)

After that I went through my day a little worse for wear. In the evening, all I had to show for it was a list of larger questions about transparency and superimposition because Revision is a never-ending dialogue between my character, on stage, and the Master of Secrets in the lighting booth; because Revision is a confession of my deficiencies, a list of survival techniques in seductive but potentially dangerous territories (the desert, the sea, the stage); because Revision is my capitulation of secrecy. And who else would I tell but the Master of Secrets, the keeper of all stage illusions?