watersirens5 .WAV

Stage set: There are five main objects and some minor objects that support them that suggest an artist's studio. They are the speakers of the characters of the play. The audience is allowed to walk around the stage and interact with the items.

 

FLYING EASEL: There’s something about this feeling of weightlessness that has been stuck in the corner of my mind for a while. Thought gets suspended like the hours get caught while crossing time-zones in air planes or spaceships.

BUFFALO GOURD ROOT: Only one thing was strange: to go on thinking as usual, to know. To realize that was, for the first moment, like the horror of a man buried alive awaking to his fate. Outside, my face came close to the glass again; I saw my mouth, the lips compressed with the effort of understanding the axolotls. I was an axolotl and now I knew instantly that no understanding was possible. He was outside the aquarium; his thinking was a thinking outside the tank. Recognizing him, being him himself, I was an axolotl and in my own world.*

FLYING EASEL: Sometimes I stare into one point for a long time and loose myself in it. This is a story about a non-image land that is a state of mind.

HOLY WATER: To cure asthma, Get a Mexican hairless Chihuahua dog and keep it nearby. The asthma will go from you to the dog. You cannot use someone else’s dog. **

FLYING EASEL: no flag, no coat of arms, no borders.

BOTTLE OF MEZCAL: In the Empire of Tattooine nothing actually happens, because the present has been occupied with the past. There is no way of objective documenting – all important events are whether carved or molded in touchable form, and the bind between the two senses – what’s heard and what’s touched – is subjective from the very start of it due to the restrictions on the touch language.

PAINTING OF LEVITATING PUTIN: One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present memory. ***

BOTTLE OF MEZCAL: When I gaze up into the sky,

I see The TWO unnamed.

The two sacred fires.

The only points that my gaze can touch.

PAINTING OF LEVITATING PUTIN Another, that the history of the universe - and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives - is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. ***

HOLY WATER: Obtain some mud from a dried river. Soak the mud in water and salt. Place the mud on your head. If hair fails to grow on your head, grass will grow on a stump. **

PAINTING OF LEVITATING PUTIN: Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true.***
 
HOLY WATER: To cure cold, tie a dirty sock around your neck.**

BOTTLE OF MEZCAL: Our telepathy scientists have invented the powder of sympathy to help us communicate.

BUFFALO GOURD ROOT: But practically it was almost impossible to have an accurately functioning clock in a ship; not to mention the hydro-clocks or sandglasses that work only placed on a still surface, but even a mechanical clock which, during all the shakes and after long months of sailing, through storming winds and ridging ocean waves, would still function properly. Nevertheless, this clock was supposed to work with extreme preciseness, because only a few second biases meant an error of a one-degree of longitude.****

BOTTLE OF MEZCAL: In the deserts you can find a lot of sleeping camps. Sleeping (and dreaming) is a telepathic way of remembering which is accumulated by the chemical element – the Powder of Sympathy – setting up an indirect contact between the physical matter and the dreamer’s mind. The Tattooine Sleeping Academy has faculties all over the Empire;

BUFFALO GOURD ROOT: One of the options described in contemporary chronicles was the powder of sympathy. A so was called magical compound that sprinkled upon a weapon that made the wound, interacted (because of the anatomical continuity) with the particles of blood above the wound, even if the wound and the weapon would be far away from one another. In process of time a wound should have healed, but the primary reaction to the dust was irritation and pain.  ****

PAINTING OF LEVITATING PUTIN: Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.**

HOLY WATER:To cure epilepsy, take a glass of water into the back yard for nine nights, look into the sky, and say: “In the name of the Lord”. Take the water and drink it.**
 
BUFFALO GOURD ROOT: Therefore it was decided to wound a dog and load it into a ship. A person at the departure point was responsible for pouring the dust at a certain hour each day on the weapon that made the wound. The dog was supposed to react with a stinging whining and therewith to let the crew of the ship know, which hour it was at the point of departure. ****

BOTTLE OF MEZCAL: The effects of the powder described by a former prisoner:

UNIDENTIFIED PRISONER: We dreamt of a gigantic metronome that stood in the center of the capital of the Empire.

Every stroke of the metronome was recorded on a clay plate, and every plate was put into a cellar below it. We were crawling in the labyrinths underground and engraved marks on the surface. Every spoken word became a memorial.”

HOLY WATER: To prevent pain after amputations, place the amputated limb in a sturdy container and burry it**
 
BOTTLE OF MEZCAL : Our prisons are dug deep below the surface of our borderless planet that is as big as your palm. The infrastructure underground is very well-developed, considering energy source and traffic. The prisons are built near the core of it, where nuclear plants extract light.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: My lover was there. She came back half-dead. The high amount of light exposed to her eyes was unbearable. After that you’re not yourself anymore.

PAINTING OF LEVITATING PUTIN: Ultimate expression of the sovereign depends on the power to make a decision who may live and who must die*****

PAINTING OF LEVITATING PUTIN:To prevent baldness, smear your head with fresh cow manure.
 

FLYING EASEL: Quote again, happy are those ages whose paths were illuminated by starlight. Yet again I drift away to my feeling of nostalgia, for the past, also for the future; out and away from the perception of myself; away from here and now; away from imagined communities, identities and social roles to the non-belonging, pure fiction, plant life. And find myself in a state outside the logic of action and reaction, reason and solution, [question and answer].

HOLY WATER: To heal colic, blow some tobacco into the baby’s face.

PAINTING OF LEVITATING PUTIN: Let me tell you a Tattooinian joke.
 
Ha, ha ha! You don‘t get it. It‘s because the sense of humor doesn‘t exist in the Tattooine empire.
 
HOLY WATER: To cure arthritis, take a dead cat into the woods to a hollow tree stump that has spunk water in it. Sprinkle that water on arthritis. Twirl the cat overhead and then toss the cat to the north. Walk away but do not look back.

 

The end of the play or a loop

Kastė Šeškevičiūtė