Moth: A Play - Johnny Pulp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVoqjl_8uLk

Script

                                           Moth 

Him: The old house down the lane named after goblin roads from ancient times, a hen was gripped by an old man under his arm, tucked under, and then the head twisted and the neck snapped. What the hell was I doing seeing that so early on? Fuck it, it's not good for settled nights. The stars like volumnia casting shadows over their tiny sons. Who was I? What speech is left? Words as deeds and words as a pice of work. Ha. I declare from the offset, to my remaining. My real power is the open body the closed body about being in a body. My capacities are in parts, always from as long as I could remember, always eloquent , able to rise like a thin stemmed flower, maybe an iris, maybe history, maybe the hunger for food not words, or bodies not words, my terrifying maternity. I was emasculate and immaculate. Haha. The monstrous regiment, my own dream, upside down and beheaded, largely touched and touching, like your hand on my arm, then on my head, then against my face, then a last word a fingering picking and picking and picking at my flanks my skin as play, well that pushed me into a position and hollowness. I am full of hollows and so are you. The specific portions of the room, the wallpaper, the settee, the tv set always on. The record player always playing something. And rain at the window. Does this make sense? Do you remember that? The black rain like mascara like tearful mascara, and I never let my tears flow for over forty decades. Bare headed and wondering and what should I have talked of? Love? War? Was I the man I am? I feel too rough. My heart is little apt. Little apt. What is that? An obscure phrase for sure. But truthful. or caught in the spirit of truthfulness. You never believed anything I felt did you? You never felt what I might have been feeling and so you never stopped to ask. Where did I come from? I shall tell you that I was bricked up as if in a cellar with a madman. I was the madman. I was severed and lived in both parts. Ever after. That's what the first thing I remember about all this was about. The way part of me fell away from the other part and I'm neither here nor there and both there and there too but never here. My predicament has been to piece myself up. Like fucking Humpty Dumpty. You crushed yourself into my face and when you rose and left without a word I wasn't able to find myself whole again. And that was the start. That was the start. 

Her: You say that was the start, you muttered that screamed it made it very clear. that was the start was it? Huh. I really have to disagree. Your body was always an abstraction to me. Something crawling around my retina. Sure, sure I fucked you. Over and over I fucked your strange abstract body. Counted the days it happened.I can't remember how many times now. Can't remember. Don't care for the numbers. The wallpaper was silver grey, flowers. Ornate. Like sculpture. I wanted to mould the space, mould it into shapes and times. I was all about the shape of time and unlike you I was severely here here here here here here... you were my little farmer. little farmer. The starlings and their murmurations. mysterious over the fields, the woods, the great pit and the coking plant, the slow trains that moved like oxen night and day, night and day, the particles of coal dust that fell from the sky every afternoon and the dense flies and wasps and honey bees and the greenhouse with the vines like stranglers. Your white pussy. The loneliness down there. far away from anyone. Like living in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere. i was nowhere and blind. A girl but with no eyes. both eyes Stolen. Inside my skull the thief made a den. Somedays I visited, crawled in from under the sheets into a dense thicket where pigs and geese people lurked and would try and eat me. You have no fucking idea. 

Him: there was a tap in the green grass lying like a secret between two short wooden planks. You had to move the planks, turn the tap and the fountain in the pond would squirt. a world apart, despair and ignorance my own self despising. Banished me from the sweet air. The skies a world elsewhere, crueler than you could memorise. Everything stirred the earth, fed us a little life in the bright summer heat. Everyone talks as if hours were normal but they were mountains. The days took us to stony rubbish. A heep of broken bodies - geese, lizards, owls, something like shadows striving, coming from you and that same horror, that same fear in the fist and what it held, clutched so tight you might have fainted in the seering screaming days. You were a clairvoyant or something, or drowned, with belladonna and situations. The wheel burning the fields every autumn. We would stand in terror on the well cut lawns and watch the fires rising unreal like red fog hovering and exhaled over out heads. Life flowed like dead strokes and crying eyes. Did we remember everything? I know we hardly memorised anything. What we have is just your chair where you sat in like a throne. Your eyes were always there but hidden as if behind your vile wings. I remember you strange perfumes, stirred and freshened and like seawood and copper and green antiques. Though everything seemed modern and forced. That's where you came , and time was a staring form, hushing us both. Footsteps - were they yours as you came and went. Coming and going.Like bad nerves. And you never never spoke. What were you thinking. Think. Think for me. Tell me what. What did you think. Did you remember? Remember me? Do you. Did you think. I couldn't tell. If it rained would you listen to the rain on the window glass? Or was it the record playing? What was it ? Since you there have been others of course. I don't think anyone has ever stopped to wonder. Life's science fiction. 

Her: I had pills. Sat in rooms all day long. It always felt like it was time. Time for what? Ah, you see, that was always the problem. Everything broken. Sunk into a broken softness and I was bare, always bare, nude, stark, a departed nymph. Unseeing and unseen. As if by waters too sweet for anything else than my weeping. I heard so much so well I heard bones when people walked. Winter evenings i was just a body naked on the ground rattled and alone and at my back the sounds came the sound of the moon turning, the moon turning, like screwing the sky. I touched myself because here it is always dark. My eyes turned upwards my eyes turned downward like tiresias blind and striving and bringing myself bring all home, touch and touch and touch and touch and touch and touch. I can close my eyes or stay open wide legs caressed by my own hand everywhere a welcome indifference without defences. I was the lowest of the dead, I don't stay alert to even my own groping. What was happening. I was a creeping thing across waters full of ionian gold fish. Red sails going east. I haven't a clue about the canal nearby. The colour of the trees and flowers and people. I can't remember anything but the touch of dust. I resent you. You were my broken lover. I expected nothing more than this burning sensation and the fucking. Like death, the cry of gulls, currents under the skin like age and youth and the whirlpool of sex that was just a singular torchlight frosty silence and the crying, the reverberations of the living and the dying, and you silent and still as stone and me like water flowing, flowing in and out like a heaving groaning snarling tidal shape and movement. I was water. a spring. A pool. you should try and recall it. You should try and recall. I know there was another there. I counted your bodies and there was always more than one other wasn't there? How strange this division? Was it that you doubled or halved? Doubled or halved? I was afraind you know. Even though I came and went as I pleased I have been afraid ever since you know. And it grows cold these nights, september and october creeping in out of the summer. The nights, damp and cool. I am always, yes, a little more afraid each year. Yes. Yes. 

Him: I seem to be a rib short. as if you snapped one from my chest and took it with you. Did you stroke yourself to sweet sleep with it. I coaxed the delicate sounds of the night by just breathing. The strange madness of cats in the dark, and the rough odd coughs of foxes heating up. the trees would stir. I always thought that woods were evil in themselves. I listened and heard insects moving though the night. I lay in my bed waiting for you to crawl in through the window. I trembled and thought of the Rue Morgue and the great bloodthirsty ape who hacked off my cock with a bone knife. The art gallery was called graves. There was a painting of a sky and a beach. No figures at all. And the sky and the beach hardly differentiated. Both sandy stone gret. I cannot remember your face you know. But you tasted of sea salt. Of brine. I imagined I was the drowned sailor and the hanged man. Just a boy watching Bunuel films in the basement with old creeps. In the corners of the room were weasels and rats and roaches and scorpions. I wrestled with other people's consciences. Became a wit and a fig like charmer. Dies a little more. Doubled, I lived two charmed lives. A sordid discretion and plagued by bad dreams and too many novels and films. My blood has thickened disastrously recently and all sorts of ailments are spreading silently. I am well practiced in being alone. I shall coordinate my dying. 

Her: coordinate. your. dying? what have you been told? I know there have been tests. Blood. Urine. Shit. Cancer everywhere. It's been for decades hasn't it? Slow, so slow, like centimetre by centimetre it makes its way, a kind of inner erosion, or rather , an accumultion of rot. You're rotting. Rotting inside. I see the way your eyes shine. The blood thick as syrup. Blackening round the heart. You can only just piss and when you do the pain is excruciating. Your own body's your crucifix. Barbarism written out into every electric system you have in plain script. My heart beat starts at a regular 160. I woke one morning to find I had turned into an enormous insect. I like to think the sounds I make are those of the death watch moth. I am attracted to enormous heat. The body temperature is enough. I move around at night. You hear that? Listen? Listen? That's me. I breath in the night. I exhale the night. In the summer fields I actually felt lightening shudder through my wings. I prefer the autumn though. The rain that fills the atmosphere.I imagine it from my childhood, those late afternoons when darkness fell and all the lights in the houses and shops and cars and buses and lorries shone, yellow lights in the rain. Ordinary lights. I think rain now is always that returning to me as a ghost. I think you are a ghost now. You haunt me. You always have. I know I haunt you. When a ghost is haunted by another ghost you know something worse is watching both of them . I know great great terror. From the day I knew for sure I was as mortal as any other dumb beast crawling along the earth I knew then that only fear would be able to settle. I tried for an imagined great ecstacy to erase the fear but that merely gave birth to cruelty. And that couldn't sustain me. If I had been braver I would have killed myself. Or you. And you. But each time the world ends I stay cringing in the dark and awaken to a new defeat and a new day. There is always just enough to see me through even though look at me. I'm exhausted. I can hardly shuffle from one foot to the next. All days seem pretty much the same to me now. You at least have your murderous suicidal body to keep you on your toes. And your double. Who is also you. I watch you slope around. Sullen. Mournful. Doing whatever it is you think might help. What is it? This? Philosophy? Did you actually get to the bottom of anything? Root it all out? There's nothing really, is there? Nothing that makes anything worth anything. Except nothing can ever make me believe that. Nothing . Nothing . Nothing. I want to remember every last thing because the justification, the warrent. It's this. This. here. Here. Being here. Being awake to the light fading out. Understanding the codes. Realising there are codes. Its probably written in at some level. Of course it is. So why would it be even possible to think otherwise about this. I hear rain again. The lights . I swam out once. As a child.I swam out from the shore. Not far. And the sky darkened and rain fell and the houses on the shore had their tiny yellow lights sparkling across the bay. And I bobbed in the black sea waters as the summer rain fell. The sky was enormous. All that was possible and human and enormous was happening right then and there. The sea is inside the head bone. My fingers should have been webbed. My wings shuffle the air streams. Electricity howled through the bones of the sea. Moths kiss light and hover in impossible spaces. I am kissing you forever from an impossible space. You were my impossible space. You will forgive me one day. Because on that day you'll know everything we do is because of the great rich doom laden space that holds us in its firmament. Your dying is already coordinated. All we're doing is finding a way to live with that. To understand a kind of grace. Its bollocks.Its enough. It's never that ha. I was open legged in the morning and night. And that was just a way of saying all this. Words. Words. Words. And now what hounds us. The sound words make when what they used to say goes away. close the door on your way out. The house is shut up and no one goes there anymore. It is filled with moths. I know what you did since you know. I saw your hand reach out as if some deadly feature of your mind floated along the grass the landing towards the room where you lay, in dark dark iceicles. What beast and how many backs? What beasts and how many backs do you make. The half light, the half of you, you, the broken half first, a bastard who can't do anything but want to rape and rape and close your eyes to it, as if shaping a mirror into your soul... no not into your soul... out of it, out of your soul. a mirror out of your soul. The tubulent night, its upheavals. A night is a horse eating another horse. Sex is that too. A horse feeding on its self. Like the serpant that wraps around the whole world. tail in mouth. No matter what anyone forswears you will see that as nothing more than a challenge to violate it and ridicule consequence. Your collaborations are sentinels of night, border guards all stained with the vaginal blood of the carcasses left out for the dogs. Yet you slay them all too and feel disgust. You fed your owl the remnants of huge cat sized rats. You hunted by the canal and in the chicken house. The stink of straw is always in your flaring nostrils. The whap of the hammer or the spade against the triangular heads. Bone splints like chalk. This is the one you see outside, in the corridore, leaving the room just before you arrive, this is the one there are rumours spreading, and discontent, and you hunt him as much as you hunt the others. His wit is a barb hooking days. Now all the women are gone. They were frightened. You saw the fear in their dazzling eyes and their temptations were no longer thrills but merely confirmed what you already knew. Everything a conjuring trick, some magical being you used as a slave and only set free when your pettiness was satiated. Hunger gone you can't even release yourself never mind the time. What kind of mage are you afterwards. Now? Huh? The wood moved towards you.. The wood was burning. and the old women, were they blind too. They were laughing. you were ridiculous. and doom was clear and straight faced and full of righteousness. Which disgusted you. Because hell's not a judgment of righteousness. Its just a flaw in a system. The crown jewell. no one but no one wants kings or queens . Its what lies beneath the crown, what slithers in the long grass, between the reeds at the still blank faced pool, the underbelly where what sneaks around is lust and greed and self preservation, eye to the mud, the filth, the grotesque burned remains, carcas meats. Bonfires in the northern lands, some pale prince and his night armies. Your woman was never yours. The doppleganger is a slithering shadowy reckoning. All hearts beat weak and fast and then on the midnight halt. Died hereafter here. Silence. Ah. There we have it. The beating against the windscott. The window glass. Something beating like a moth insane for light, the lamplight, the taper that's snuffing out. Listen to the beating of those enraged engorged beating beating wings. They are my kisses in the night. Kiss. Kiss. Kiss. And then silence. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

                                             End

Notes

'House of goblin roads: the neck-snap is the overture, a brittle star in the mouth. Speech arrives as scab; it flakes; we lick the iron. The room is a skull lined with silver wallpaper; the chair is a hot altar; the record player is a throat grinding its last vowel. Bodies open/close like shutters in a storm, him bricked into himself with his own mad twin, her eyeless and hearing through the skin. They do not converse; they molt. Words pick, pick, pick at the flank until the flank becomes the word and the word becomes a bruise. Coal dust falls like black rain mascaraing the day; a secret tap in the grass detonates a small fountain, childhood magic turned rite. Fields burn every autumn; ash ascends as if consecrated; the greenhouse strangles; rats learn the grammar of hammers. Nothing is symbol; everything is a nerve.Desire is moth-logic: heatward, singeward, a powdery mouth kissing the lamp until the kiss is only cinder. He speaks of doubling and rotting and the tender bureaucracy of dying; blood goes syrup-thick, a sacrament of tar. She answers with sovereign fear, a liturgy of damp nights and the clean cruelty of diagnosis. Ghosts haunt ghosts; the surplus of terror overflows its own container. He is boy-ape-hanged-man, a basement of Bunuel screens and stares; she is water-spring-pool, an acephalic tide breaking the line of the room. Their dialogue is not a line but a heat index. Lamps drink the oxygen. Breath shortens. Language eats its own wick.The theatre wants the body raw and unsocial. Gesture replaces plot: the three-finger picking; the sudden wing-beat in the wrists; the calcifying pelvis; the shiver that refuses meaning. Open body, closed body, body without use, base matter steaming on the altar-chair. The gallery called Graves hangs a sky indistinguishable from beach; the eye fails its jurisdiction; sovereignty passes to the wound. When they say love they mean rigor. When they say cruelty they mean clarity. The audience is conscripted into the rite, smudged with coal, lit by a taper that shortens syllable by syllable.Everything repeats, not as memory but as sentence. Black rain. Burning fields. The tap. The ash. The chair. The room shrinks to a pupil the moth tries to enter. Kisses count themselves as wing-beats against wood and glass. Then a blunt surplus of “nothing nothing nothing” tolls like a black bell. The lamp goes dark. Copper and seaweed on the tongue. Warmth still clinging to the chair like a misdemeanor that has become a theology. This is not catharsis; it is the ecstatic accountancy of loss, the sacred filth where touch and speech exchange skins and leave us staring at the cooled wick, starved and, somehow, absolved.