WHAT IS THE WAY OUT OF THE CHALK TEMPLE?

A Review of Chalk Temple a play by Isabella Russell-Ides

By Max Earl Blair

Chalk Temple was presented as the second half of Dharma Broads III-Pagan Fusion Theatre at the Undermain Theatre on Sunday, August 14th, 2005. The first half consisted of five performance art pieces by Maria Golia with Letitia Eldredge, Laney Yarber, Letitia Eldredge, Karen X with Ricardo Garza, and Tammy Gomez with friends. At intermission, after taking eight pages of notes, I was told by Karen X that I was only there to review the play, not the performance art. Perhaps this is a good thing. Performance art and drama do have some similarities, like cats and dogs, but, like cats and dogs, they're really totally different animals. A fine drama critic may have great difficulty accessing even great performance art. I hardly consider myself a fine drama critic, but, if I'd known my comments on the performance art would not be welcomed, I'd probably have skipped the first half so as to give the play the fullness of my absolutely undiluted perception.So onto the play. The script was published in the previous issue of this magazine, and by the time you read this, the run will be long over, so it seems best to confine the bulk of my commentary to what can be read, rather than how it was staged. However, part of the purpose of criticism is for the benefit of the artists who actualized it so they can improve their craft. I'll be brief, and get these notes out first. I found the Pagan Babe's Hamburgular mask to be a distraction. Why was she wearing that? What was its significance? I don't know and haven't as of this writing been able to find out. Nicolas Cormier III, who plays Monk III, is probably between 28 and 32, since he joined the USAF in 1995. His dreadlocks make him look younger, no more than twenty-five. His onstage attitude of constant abject terror enhances this youthful illusion. Tracy (Tracie? She's credited both ways) Foster is probably about 25. I think it was Robert Heinlein or some other misogynist science fiction author who said that a beautiful forty year old woman who tries to look twenty winds up making herself look seventy. In this case, it holds doubly true for a 25 year old woman costumed to look like Dakota Fanning in War of the Worlds. She looks enough older than Cormier here that it's hard to buy the romance. There are several piles of rice scattered around the stage, but in the action of the play, Monk III complains that there is only one small pile of rice there. What? Can he not look around? What is this supposed to mean?Okay. Onto the playscript rather than particulars of how the play was staged. Playwright Isabella Russell-Ides is a fine poet. And there is indeed some beautiful poetry contained in this script. Take this interchange for example: MONK II You are still young.  There are many lifetimes in this lifetime yet to come.  MONK IYes brother, prayer your brow.  Be at peace.  All is dust and beauty now.MONK IIIWhat GodFool burns his own house down?  Riots himself.  Pillages and rapes himself.   MONK IAnd makes himself homeless?  And nameless?  Perhaps he had enough.  Enough of all this.  I remember how we taught him the taste of us.  How we doused our orange robes with gasoline and made a bonfire of our very beings.  Made war within against the war without.MONK IIThe aroma of burnt flesh crawled through the Buddha's nostrils.  And now he has eaten his own home.To which I say simply, wow. That's powerful, memorable, lyrical, beautiful poetry. But a poem's a poem; a play's a play.A play is an imitation of an action. That action should support some sort of unifying principle, an underlying theme. Even an absurdist play like Ionescu's The Bald Soprano (La Conatrice ShavŽ) has such a principle that it revolves around. When the People's Liberation Army invaded Tibet in 1950, many monks were imprisoned. Often, these monks would draw their temples on the floors of their cells. In this play, the regime is much harsher than Chairman Mao's was. The monks, at least Monks I & II, constantly draw and immediately erase their lost home. Until they don't. The badly injured Monk III, who seems to be a new addition in this little cell, wakes up and is miraculously healed. The other two monks proclaim him God and draw the temple around him and leave it. Then the Pagan Babe, who until this point has been serving as narrator, enters the action, falls in love with Monk III, who falls in love with her, and then the action kind of peters out without going anywhere.This whole thing raises a several questions I just don't have answers for. If the regime is so harsh that the imprisoned monks constantly draw and erase their temple, how come they're allowed their orange robes and prayer mats?  How long have these monks been there? Why does the female narrator become a character? Why is the fourth monk even mentioned? I plumb all these unanswered questions and strive to find the meaning, yet meaning eludes me.Isabella introduced the play, and said that all the characters were archetypes. What archetypes do they represent? I've read Joseph Campbell, and I really can't tell. In fact, Monk I & Monk II seem to be indistinguishable from each other. Isabella provides this Synopsis: "CHALK TEMPLE is a post-apocalyptic fable about three Monks and a Pagan Babe searching for a way out and a way in. They find it."But the play ends with all four characters remaining onstage. What have they found? Why are they still there? Why haven't they gone somewhere? What is the fucking point? Not only is there no exit at the ending, there are no exits period. There are no entrances either. All four characters remain onstage throughout. The only thing resembling a change is the Pagan Babe's insertion into the action, her transition from observer and commentator to participant. The play truly has no start, no motion, no action, and no conclusion. Only this single sub-construction. As such, I guess that must be its climax. What does that mean? Does it mean that the world is a closed state and the only entrance or exit possible is the change of states, the change from one state of being into another? If so, what of the absent fourth monk? What of the only alluded guards? Is the meaning of this something so deep and primal that I'm too shallow to get it? Or is there indeed truly no direction? I honestly can not conclude either way.Is the prison a metaphor for the universe and the chalk temple a metaphor for the world and so to find your way out of the prison of your mind you need to draw on the floor? I cannot say with confidence.If I didn't know better, I'd think that this was some sort of subtle Fundamentalist Christian attack on people who don't know the Full Perfect and Sufficient Love of His Son Their Savior Jesus Christ. If Jesus isn't the center of your world, you're trapped in a doom of your own making. But subtlety is totally foreign to those sorts of people, and I know that the playwright isn't one of them. In the end, I'm just confused.

I ALMOST LOOKED AT YOU, BIG WORLD, ALMOST

Review of

est ce que ca vous derange?
Todd Buckley
C1999 Chartreuse and Indigo Publishing
bucktoddley@hotmail.com

By Gordon Hilgers

When I finally wound up on Coney Island; when all the self-defined cultural
revolutionaries, social misfits, urban guerrillas and barroom warriors
finally transmogrified together in my mind and life to become the absurd
clowns they’d always been, I learned this: After you’ve been deranged for
awhile, you eventually become socially conscious. And if you get that far,
you ultimately become deranged again.

That’s a sad fact. But the kind of derangement to which I refer, the
disarray that gathers this side of mental illness, isn’t so bad as it
sounds. Simply put, sometimes our lives lose meaning. And we’ve all fallen
into disorder. Generally, the political, social, cultural, interpersonal
and aesthetic constructs upon which we’ve depended to remain in their proper
places, at various times of change, have lost their seeming solidity. We
might have watched a relationship slip into ruin; we might have been forced
into a move from a beloved residence or into coping with a serious illness.
All sorts of events are capable of pushing us outside of our safe routines
and into a zone where we’re forced to live in the uncertain present, a place
where freedom demands behavior we’re not used to. Hell, we might have done
L.S.D. for the first time, and from the testimonies of famous literary drug
users such as Thomas Huxley, William S. Burroughs and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, we’ve learned the experience tends to change a person, sometimes
permanently. “& at once it struck me,” wrote British poet John Keats to
his brothers George and Tom, “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason…” Poetry’s a pretty good vehicle for finding your way by losing it because if you work hard at expressing beauty you eventually discover yourself in the midst of a world where everything’s elusive. Not a bad place to be if
you’re strong enough to take it.

This state of mind, however, seems doubly hard to maintain in Dallas—at
least in its present stage of cultural growth. Even the best of our
citizenry probably doesn’t see it that clearly, but if there’s any
identifiable zeitgeist that continues to endure here it’s one in which
people project an unconscious contempt for anything and anyone out of place.
That mildly abusive tendency runs so deep in local traditions and works so
well for so many widely divergent social groups that it’s almost inescapably
widespread. It’s safe to sneer here; practically a cottage industry that
allows the counterculture to deride corporate culture from a harmless
distance, and vice versa. Still, we love our rules—because rules fend off
disorder, and hence falsely deliver us from our insecurities, both of which
factors have been drubbed into us as things to fear. The tyrannical aspect
of usually common sense manners also holds big premiums in Dallas, because
manners help us to safely demand sanctions against those who slip out of
order. It doesn’t matter that this process is a frightening hangover from a
relatively ignorant, pioneer version of Victorianism, its usually successful
attempt to control public behavior nevertheless dismembers dissidence quite
effectively. The police sweep downtown streets of the homeless because
homelessness is a visible symptom of cultural derangement—bad manners to
sleep on the street—and homelessness is a bothersome force that defies our
perceived need for safety and order. And yet when local architects unveil
conceptual urban village projects intended to mimic San Francisco’s Mission
District, the “messy vitality” they tell us is an organizing principle is
really only a prefabricated one accomplished on the cheap with plenty of
Tyvek insulation and spray-on stucco that’s partially made of Styrofoam.
Once the clean veneer of Dallas-bred development covers everything in sight,
will there be anything beneath it left living? So much around here that’s
completely fake.

Area poet Todd Buckley, confirmed Buddhist, knows a little about the process
of derangements like these: We’ve got to fake ourselves into believing the
unreal is real or risk being branded “not a team player,” and we’ve got to
reserve a Dallas Cowboy jersey for Super Bowl Sunday even if we think
professional sports belongs to the “bread and circuses” variety of
prefabricated entertainment. Unsurprisingly, given the cultural maw that
fights us all to exhaustion, Buckley’s poetry is beholden to a restless yet
familiar rebelliousness. The source of this “oppositional/defiance
disorder” Buckley seems to find infuriatingly intangible, however. Reading
his poetry, readers may sense the poet’s effort to justify himself as akin
to flirting with a herd of snorting bulls in a pitch-dark bullring. He
feels berserk breezes as monstrous shadows veer dangerously close to goring
him, he’d probably be less rebellious if he could only see them clearly, but
he’s seemingly satisfied, too, measuring shades of darkness and cursing down
the Minotaur. Here we see poems that tell us obvious things--violence and
generalized insensitivity are “bad,” for example—yet their immediate
connections to his personal life aren’t there. Buckley’s refusal to engage
when the big contradictions he reads about in the newspaper intersect with
his personal world is a serious problem with his vision that will force
readers perhaps to conclude he’s casting aspersions on abstractions, a
somewhat cowardly and futile tactic considering all the bulls in the ring.

The wholesale effect of Buckley’s party meeting of poetry also may remind
you of Don Quixote challenging the circus lion to a roadside joust. The
lion (of poverty, injustice, economic slavery, office politics, choose one)
is safely in a cage and real world engagement amounts to a transcendental
suicide because conflict is pretense. Here, social or political engagement
is prearranged, but the practical ends to these chatty charades are
questionable beyond highlighting the poet’s need to seem important. What
we’re really witnessing is disengagement, a symptom of a knight-errant’s
derangement. Derangement here hints at psychic disassociation that keeps
the problematic real world safely behind the bars of a carnival wagon the
poet pulled into town to show it off to parochial innocents who’ve never
seen an exotic beast before.

The process, symptoms and effects of political derangement are so common
among political and cultural dilettantes in Dallas that most outsiders to
the game confuse it with reality. We’ve got the trappings of dissent, in
the form of a number of poems, but the substance is unquestionably absent,
the sum of these parts an almost perfect definition of bourgeois culture.
It would be more interesting to readers if Buckley had made a stab at
bringing them into touch with the carefully managed soft machine of which
Dallas is most famous. Public discourse disenfranchises the local public
from relevant discourses with power because of the city’s position as a
center of the military-industrial complex where Bell Helicopters and F-115s
and Daisy Cutter bombs roll off area assembly lines like a day at the
office. It would be dangerous to national security if the area fomented an
active, large and effective anti-war protest community. Wouldn’t it?
Buckley would do well to examine closely some of the more effective
“dissident” American poems—poems like Jorie Graham’s “What the End is For (Grand Forks, North Dakota),” in which Graham compares the gradual breakdown of a romantic relationship with an episode in which she surreptitiously watches 500 B-52s on alert on an Air Force runway. If a local poet had written that, the local intelligentsia would have swooned, shamed and called the soft machine into action.

Some Buckley poems do partially elucidate various states of being that
strongly hint an alternative to local pretense—certain colorations of the
invincible here and now—but even there nothing’s in context, nothing’s set
off in relief and nothing’s in the background. These moods merely float on
open water, not an island in sight, frantically signaling the poet’s
apparently repressed sense of alienation. Yes, this poet is vague indeed
about the details where the devils hide.

Still other poems assemble dozens of images, but nothing holds together.
The ethical force, in other words, is strangely absent in a grab bag of
mixed metaphors that tantalizingly don’t add up. These poems are like women
who sexually tease you because they want attention but don’t have the
self-esteem to attract you to them by less aggressive means—like
conversation. The self-published chapbook’s title asks a question that
honestly answers it all. “est ce que ca vous derange?” is French for “Does
this bother you?” The answer is: “Yes.”

Some rightfully argue that context isn’t always necessary in good poetry,
and that narrowing background completely out of the picture is an effective
tactic, and finally, that describing moods to the exclusion of other factors
helps to highlight them. Because some moods temporarily remove us from
circumstances of the real world, it’s natural to describe them accurately.
Here’s Buckley’s poem, “water’s secret cry,” in its entirety: “you and i
both heard it in your kitchen / the sound of water’s secret cry / the song
of / the bondage of / the pipe and / the freedom of / the cloud.”

Tight focus upon ambient sound within the minimal context of a room
amplifies a message that hides deep within a cleverly utilized
indeterminacy. The poem doesn’t need more than this. Buckley doesn’t
attempt to convey an episodic explanation of the effect of hot water on
steel, or any possible causes for the noise connected to air bubbles in
kitchen plumbing, nor does he see any need to take us all the way to the
neighborhood water works where a pump compresses liquids from miles beyond;
and he doesn’t try to make some grand statement regarding political problems
water workers might be having, or tell us that machines are doing just
terrible things to water, which might stand for the human spirit, might
stand for the necessity of life, might stand for the flow of reality or time
or whatever. Nope. We simply hear a cry. And as we respond to any cry
that sounds like a human cry, our emotions awaken. Our hearts will tend to
rhyme with anything if we’ll just listen.

Despite idiosyncrasies displayed, such as that irritatingly distracting
lower-case “i” Buckley among others utilize to express something about
feeling intricate towards their writing pads, most of Buckley’s poetry in
the vein of “water’s secret cry” successfully conveys a gentle groove that’s
harder to accomplish than it looks. If he’d stayed right there, “est ce que
ca vous derange?” wouldn’t have been too bothersome. Some poems, however, swing into sweepingly grand political statements that have no palpable connection to the reality he’s worked hard to convey in other sectors of the
book. “People may soon start fighting,” he announces in “Where Are We
Getting To?” “For real freedom / Freedom beyond mere democracy / Freedom far removed from bureaucracy / Freedom to do whatever the people want to do.”

Pardon me if I spew.

It really worries me that all the young American poets of oppression have
never known it. Most of their “big challenges” to authority are unresolved
issues that involve their parents and their potty training. They’ll
pontificate over the Pope, declare their slacker jihads upon middle class
people who like to wear golf shirts, but if you ever get inside their rooms,
you’ll discover they haven’t learned to make their beds.

So whenever Buckley hollers for “real freedom,” friends and neighbors might
best serve his cause by pointing out he’d do better supplying good,
specific, down-to-earth, right-up-there-in-your-face examples of “freedom”
and how it plays or doesn’t play in terms of his immediate existence. To
which interpretation of freedom does he refer anyway? Hegelian freedom?
Existential freedom? Freedom from sociobiological constraints? Freedom
from the inconvenience of tampons?

And when a man plows through a red light, is he expressing freedom or
license? He can pump his fist in the air out his car window all he wants,
but it doesn’t mean much to the drivers around him. Someone’s going to
think, “That guy’s an idiot.” Someone else’s going to think, “That guy’s
gotta be drunk.” Some might think it’s racist for a white guy to make the
Black Power sign in the middle of East Dallas. Impressionable fools will
definitely take the gesture as an overt statement that everybody needs to
start running red lights all over Dallas. And if that man’s “revolutionary
spark” catches on, sooner or later East Dallas is going to start looking
like downtown Mexico City. Real freedom: a lot of banged up cars,
head-bandaged children on crutches, shouting drivers, people with guns
firing at each other from behind taxicabs, the police disempowered by
whirlwinds of social pandemonium, smoke from burning gasoline ruining the
air and running into water drains, and a couple of happy anarchists sitting
in a hot-sheet hotel room smoking weed and high-fiving it.

So what are we to make of “What Are We Getting To” and other similar Buckley poems? It’s like when you wonder and wonder hard what makes a drunkard flail angrily as a bar fight brews. This is not simply a release of
inhibitions. You know that because you’ve been drunk too. Your eyes blur,
roll and lose focus; your ears fill with imaginary cotton; your fingers go
numb; all you smell is beer or whiskey or god-awful gin; and you taste it
too. Deprived of your five senses—well, who wouldn’t start braying and
throwing chairs? It’s damned frightening. Your eyesight tunnels until the
only light left is the size of two wobbly manhole covers and your instinct
is to fight, resist or run. A primitive reaction’s got hold of you:
Project, deny, withdraw. An irritable grasping for fact and reason.
Unconscious contempt for what’s out of place.And anyone who’s bothered with Dallas-area bar-culture knows, unconsciously or not, that the Project, Deny, Withdraw syndrome encompass a counterculture all its own. That’s what makes television comedies like “Desperate Housewives” so funny. They’re beautiful, they’ve got money, but they can’t function in the real world without playing inane little games.

The same instinctive reaction is true in another altered state: When you
don’t understand why events happen because your eyesight is tunneled into
one, big, generalized image jelled into meaning by a televangelist or Noam
Chomsky, your ability to directly assess crucial detail is inhibited and you
suspect threat, conspiracy, plots against the public good. Assumptions
based upon selectively chosen details that lead us to believe the entire
world is a maw of intentional violence and general insensitivity thrive on
the very dearth of detail that bore them in the first place, and they fool
us into looking for singular sources that usually don’t exist at all.
Marxism has as many conspiracy or prejudice matrices as evangelical
Christianity even though nobody accuses evangelicals or anarcho-syndicalists
of prejudice nearly as much as the world should. What’s really happening is
this: The violence and general insensitivity of the world is too
complicated, too detailed for anything to be put off as inherently bad.
It’s better to start small. Better to work from your neighborhood on out.
But what relational standards would you use? A handshake? A stick of
dynamite? A “transcendental” avoidance of everything problematic?

Perhaps partially aware of the unarticulated linkage between private mental
states and how they might play in social or political contexts, Buckley
points us in the right direction with his visions of tightly wound insular
states that indeed imply an attentive relational standard. The proximity of
these poems to his broad jousts with the greater world usher all kinds of
questions to mind, but most of us will miss them because we’re not paying
attention. Why are we so disinterested with the nuts and bolts all around
us of the Great Big Machine we seem to find so oppressive? What dulled our
senses to the point that we can deny the existence of that machine in our
daily lives while we still maintain our freedom to complain about it? Why
can’t we carry “water’s secret cry” into the context of “What Are We Getting
To?”

The world outside your window is never really free.

Gordon Hilgers is badder than Michael Jackson, so beat it.