As I remember seeing the play at the Royal Court, the numbers were written down franticly. The first lot anyway. The mirror above the stage reflected to the audience those numbers also. What I got from it was a sence of attempting to bring order to a blasted, fragmented mind. The inability for one to touch the other. Desired or otherwise. Distance. I got the book of the play later on. I thought of "mood" as may be plotted on a graph. Starting at tip-top, new day, 100% for ever and ever. Let's see what happens. A blip in the middle. But ending up just above rock-bottom.. The second lot, consistently, in job lots, down. No f*cking about. I had thought of those Ticker-timer tapes when measuring the descent of a lump of wood on wheels traveling down a acceleration compensated slope. Then other masses loaded on top to measure acceleration and get a number as close to 9.8 m/s/s. GRAVITY. That kind of thing. (Ever done one of those market research things where you tick certain boxes and the problems encountered when your answers just don't fit). I remember seeing a picture in kind of psychological book where the eye movements of a "schizophenic" were mapped onto the picture. (It was not unlike that of a Bruegel) It was all over the place and outside that of the frame as well. Not by much though. An identical picture was alongside it with the eyemovements of a "normal". These were pretty stationary, around a few figures and objects. Here is a quote of a quote taken from the book Koolaids by Rabih Alameddine (published 1998), "Normality highly values it's normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years. R.D.Laing, a British psychiatrist. Need I say more?" Well I'd like to know something of what was included in the figure. Someone I knew some time ago put it even clearer, "A child is born into this world it's head is filled with sh*t". Right, time for some air!
Archive 4-3-2004
