July 25 - Kat Rodriguez

Verfremdungseffekt

Verfremdungseffekt

By Kat Rodriguez

SCENE 1

Cue song “Apophenia”

A teacher dresses and prepares for the day.  She applies her makeup into a transparent pane of glass.

Stage is lit by shadeless lamps. A large classroom-style portable blackboard faces downstage, center. Pieces of fabric hang from walls and ceiling, unevenly spaced.

Song ends.  Teacher exits.

Hum.

Teacher enters.

Turning blackboard to face class, she lectures:

Four lines

In an infinite universe

Are all we have rationed

For the human experience.

Hungering for immortality,

We flatten ourselves.

Noxious blue light grates and chafes

Neural pathways until

Spacetime inhabits

Neither time nor space

Only pixels.

Only points of light

Adorning puckered plastic.

Oh, we dissolve into putrid pointillism

A macabre dance of bits bots bytes

Gyrating to the beat of 01 01 01 01.

We transcend logic

While remaining so small

Entwined in the fine, strong arms of

those finite four lines.

Entranced by the hypnotic hum

Emanating from the voids

Where their hearts would beat

if they had them.

We look into the screen and see gods, but

Beyond the static

Beyond the dull digi-veil

We are mimes,

fragile as an infant’s bones.

We are excited electrons

Within an atomic supermax

Bumping together haphazardly

Cue “Verfremdungseffekt PT I”

She stands to face the blackboard, drawing a long arrow with each color of chalk. Linear movement. Song ends and fades into hum.  She speaks, crushing pieces of chalk into powder under her foot.

Since the beginning of time, or

at least since I started counting it

They told me not to forget my umbrella on a rainy day,

lest I come in contact with that which

sustains life, but also ruins silk

and perfectly coiffed hair.

It wasn’t until years later

I started to realize, time,

Like money,

Is contrived, conceptual—has assigned meaning

Around that time, I also realized

I prefer to lie in the rain with my mouth open

without the fear of hairspray running into it,

and losing my worth down my throat.

Much of my youth was music and meter but,

lately, it’s been difficult to accept

that time is really so mathematical.

Measured by such strictly designated increments.

A minute goes on forever when you’ve got an important call to make,

but have disabled your iphone by entering a wrong password one too many times,

while a minute passes in the blink of an eye when it’s the last minute

you spend in bed with your lover before getting up and facing the day.

Lately, I like to lie in the rain until I dissolve—

until everything that hurts feels small

and silly, like a word you’ve repeated too many times ,

Reminding you that language, like time and money,

has no inherent value,

unlike rain, which was sustaining life

and ruining hair, long before we

decided to name it.

Cue computer noises

Begin spreading powdered chalk over the drawn lines on the chalkboard until they are one entity, no longer discernable from one another.   She covers all exposed parts of her body in the powder.

Sing to me,

Sing me something real,

I cannot hear

Beyond this beeping.

I can take no more of

This ringtone requiem.

Open your eyes

Open your eyes

Open your eyes

Receive

I’m searching

Seeking

Seeing power in the fluttering of my eyelids

I exit the womb

And my skin doesn’t feel like home.

Sound effects out; silence and stillness. Pause; then begin:

The wind rustles

Pages of a book

And I wonder if

love

Is going the way

Of the abacus.

And I wonder if

Perhaps Hell is

Air-conditioned

And Heaven is made

Out of bits of modeling clay.

The wind rustles

Pages of a book

And I hit my funny bone

So hard I think it may

Never stop laughing

Cue “Codeine” by Luke Elderkin

Turn half of lamps off.

SCENE 2

Half of lamps back on

She writes “Scene 2” on Blackboard

She sits on ground amongst the dregs of chalkdust, Her jacket is off and her shoulders are covered in dust. 

Cue “Verfremdungseffekt PT II”—distorted somehow, like bent record.

I can see the changes in the mirror

Wider face, thicker brows

Eyes vibrant, no trace of clouds or dust.

I can feel the changes in my body

Slower pulse, steady palms

Heavier gait, lighter heart.

Then you open your mouth, and I am taffy

Twisted and pulled grotesquely through time and space

Until I cannot tell who or when I am

And I am not sure if the last few years actually happened, or if they were just rogue firings of a desperate mind

Sick of all the clouds and dust.

She cuts up a line of powder and insufflates it.

She lays back, addresses the ceiling

Shadows fall

Falling fluttering forensic DNA test of light

Floating above the familiar S-curve defining me from space.

Eyes open

Eyes closed

Arms up

Receiving the universe.

No breeze

No bloody glow of moonlight seeping under my eyelids.

Standing still

Smelling like stardust

Almost, but not quite.

Sloshing dripping

Cautiously, I peer beyond the uterine threshold

Once again, unable to comprehend the smooth expanses and

Fissured valleys of

My own skin.

SCENE 3 (said out loud to audience):

A dance.

cue “Black Ops,”

She rises; dancing, she writes “the word of the day is: perspective” on blackboard. She begins to sway and move in a bacchic frenzy with the fabrics.  The recordings morph into the hum/computer effects, She spins, then speaks, frantically:

Perched on the fence between two worlds

My mind, split pea soup.

I am Icarus

Falsely divine.

Trapped.

Time crawls by

Yet, I fear I’ll miss half a lifetime

Should I allow myself to blink.

Worries are superficial

Wisdom, asinine.

I grasp for reality and pull back a fistful of paint

It dries

Cracks

Flakes

Falls

Silence.

She is released from trance.  Realizing she is still in her classroom, she tries to gain composure and resume her lesson.  She cuts down one of the pieces of fabric and begins cutting it more and more into an entirely different piece of cloth (snowflake).

NOTHING has inherent meaning

How quickly words turn to haphazard, meaningless grunts, pops, and clicks with a slight alteration to the lens of perception.

And suddenly there’s this sense of losing everything

A webpage that fails to load

404 error weeps tears of disappointment

And lost potential

Mourns what may have been

Reminding me of how small I am

She puts jacket back on.  Reveals snowflake.

Perspective is what distinguishes

One bit of nothing

From another bit of nothing

But in the end

It’s all the same nothing

Nonetheless

At least it’s fun to imagine somethings in the nothings

Begins to cut up fabric snowflake

Castles made of sand

Polymer potatoes

Scatters fabric bits

But art cannot be a safe space

Begins hacking down remainder of  fabrics

Art is not a safe space

ART IS NOT A FUCKING SAFE SPACE

YOU ARE NOT SAFE

She walks to blackboard and writes, “oh bertolt, u naughty minx”

She  turns off all or almost all lamps, then goes to turn on single spotlight over her head.

But maybe just maybe there lies something beyond this eternal stasis this knot in my stomach this transformative tickle my mind is a full barren pit brimming with  hot steamy dreamy sexy nothing ready to strike we thrive on emptiness then wonder why our hearts echo what oh what could be worse than this waiting that terrifying ticking itching nothing I’m dying I’m laughing oh god I’m coming I’m drumming I’m dreaming I’m thinking and thinking and thinking things are not always as they seem we’re all mad, remember?

She turns of spotlight, goes back to blackboard, erases it, and writes, “all I am is distance”

On recording, as she gets ready for bed, removing chalk dust (using makeup remover and pads):

Gentle in its nuance

The fallacy of the self devours my

Hours of consciousness

Mock discoveries shroud the eternal illusion in which

I paint myself

Cue “Moment of Bliss by Luke Elderkin” 

Caulking every crack I dare not peer through

Childlike, I dip a toe

I taste transcendence

It’s salty, like love

O, do not be fooled by the trembling tendrils

Upon which I stand

For all the love I’ve stuffed

into a thousand tiny boxes in my thoracic cavity

could split an atom

Sometimes, it feels as if

This paradigm shift is more of a Great Implosion

The one that turns gastric acid burps

Into hugs from people who never hugged you enough

And dropped ice cream cones

Into warm blankets, straight out of the dryer

And the whole world will smell like freshly cut grass

And sound like nursery rhymes

Repeated and repeated like a prayer,

a pietà

Until I can feel the hum of the universe vibrating my ligaments

Until I can feel the grains of sand between my teeth

She picks up bat and shatters chalkboard.  Exits.

 End.