In Infrared, the opening play of Mac Wellman’s recent collection, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, the unseen narrator, “an ungainly self in search of itself,” reveals itself as some kind of “pseudosolid . . . a hollow within a cube within another hollow” (8). This humanistic self-seeking acts as a translating bridge to Wellman’s much broader, much weirder array of identities that might seek the recursive feedback loop we call self-awareness. If it is convenient to hold onto an old word, self, it is equally important to attend to the fact that the identity of selves, characters, or voices in Wellman’s work has never been strictly human and in fact is not strictly material. His recent work is filled with pseudosolid voices that map their “haunted, topological obsession” with holes and hollows, and the filling up of space by emptiness (Infrared 8). One critical strategy to account for Wellman’s departure from what he calls “Euclidean” character (a designation concerned principally with consistency) has been to highlight his alignment with “language” writing, particularly in relation to the Language poets, the Russian Futurists, and Gertrude Stein’s “landscape plays,” and so to projects that insist on the materiality of language over (or alongside) its signification. These connections are not amiss–indeed they are critical–but they do not fully account for Wellman’s project; they sidestep the heart (to use an old word) of his work (or in his own imagery, they miss the clearing in the woods where the spooky thing happens). To isolate the materiality of language is to neglect Wellman’s concern with multiple registers of thinking, and with theater’s function as a place where something happens in our thinking, something he calls “apparence.” The material surfaces of Wellman’s plays are only pseudosolid; the giving-way of those surfaces constitutes the action of his work, and we find ourselves in a strange hole. In the extraordinary prevalence of holes (both phenomenological and figurative) in Wellman’s new collection, I find an intensification of a philosophical strand in his writing: a ceremonial concern with a weirdness that is wild, a weirdness gone feral in math-fictional space. In this essay I explore his strategies for writing us into these registers of thinking by examining two kinds of holes. The first is what I am calling a “hole poetics”: the deployment of holey strategies in the poetic line. This holed line functions as both a preparation for thinking beyond the already-known, and as a scalar, fractal iteration of the topography of this beyond-space which is my second hole, a ceremonial, nasty, terrifying place that Wellman calls “Hoole’s Hole,” where the non-Aristotelian, non-Euclidian event of apparence happens.
Locating Wellman
Wellman is a node of connection within the New York theater community. A loose assembly of younger writers has formed around him, through his MFA program at Brooklyn College, the ‘Pataphysics workshop series, and his generous presence in the scene.1 His influence is already profound and continues to grow, not as a “school of Mac Wellman,” but as a broadly cast license to think of plays in terms of language, and to value wrongness, ceremony, and a bit of demonism in the theatrical project (contra the overwhelming prevalence of psychological and moralistic drama). The amount of critical writing on Wellman is incommensurate with his place as a thinker within new theater, perhaps because of the communal nature of the theater scene, where ideas are exchanged in person more than through journals or small presses. What has been written about him in theater criticism is largely in response to his denouncement early in his career of “the theater of good intentions,” and his proffering the possibility of what “character” might be beyond the motivation-guided, coherent, explicable figures that populate 20th century realism and its acting methods. On the poetics side, Marjorie Perloff has written briefly on Wellman: a foreword to his collection, Cellophane; and “Harm’s Other Way,” a short piece for The Mac Wellman Journal, a lo-fi volume of essays put together by the DIY Sock Monkey Press for the 1997 Mac Wellman Festival. Perloff name-checks Wellman as one of the many poets whom she might have included in her study, 21st Century Modernism. In that work, she valorizes the transmission of a modernist language project, compositions of a counter-signifying materiality of words, from four great modernists— Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Marcel Duchamp and Velemir Khlebnikov—to their 21st century inheritors, language poets Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian and Steve McCaffery. Wellman’s projective affiliation here is in the Khlebnikov transmission: the “charging via neologism, paronomasia . . . [that] defies semantic coherence . . . [inverting] the ‘ordinary language’ aesthetics of Stein and the use of everyday objects like combs and urinals in Duchamp.” For her own formulation of the “strangeness of the ordinary,” Perloff says Khlebnikov “substitutes the ordinariness of the strange” (21st Century 126). In her two short essays on Wellman, Perloff works in this vein of finding strangeness in the close-focus of phrases and neologisms. As with her analysis of Khlebnikov’s etymological play, she attends to Wellman’s investigations in the political and cultural phraseology on the cluttered surface of American English—remember, she asks, the “butterfly” ballots and hanging “chads” of the 2000 election (Foreword x)?
Perloff delights in the critique of American culture that Wellman’s making-strange produces. Cellophane, written out of a two-year self-imposed assignment to write 2 pages of bad American grammar every day, might epitomize this strand of his work, with such formulations as: “Who them alltime lowdown hunch scattershot boys? Who would ought to have done did?” (175). But I would argue that it is not the strange surface of the ordinary that Wellman would have us encounter in his theater, but rather something more dimensionally strange—where things are strange because we have become strangers. His essays on theater describe a shifting emphasis, articulating first a space of resistance (“The Theater of Good Intentions,” 1984), then a statement on the weirdness of the real (“A Chrestomathy of 22 Answers to 22 Wholly Unaskable and Unrelated Questions Concerning Political and Poetic Theater,” 1993), and now a space of ceremony (“Speculations,” 2004). The plays collected in Difficulty are by no means autonomous, material objects. They are more like Swiss cheeses of plays, where strange holes open onto skewed dimensions. The place where poetic language experiment meets the theatrical project is a fold that I hope to address, moving from the line to the ceremony, and so from sound to proprioception. The nature of a theatrical hole has very much to do with the actual space of theater, but as Wellman writes in Bad Penny, “the Way is ever difficult to discover” (148). Part of that difficulty lies in the dual mindfulness that poetic theater requires. Examined only with the analytical tools of a single discipline, whether poetry, philosophy, or theater, the movements of mind that constitute the theatricality of Wellman’s plays become obscured, or rather, they hide like the Black-Tufted Malabar X, the nasty resident of Hoole’s hole. This essay does not seek to uncover what is hiding, but rather to think about how to inhabit the space where we can listen to its transmissions, and to gesture toward writing strategies for finding ourselves strange.
A Theater of Landscape
Wellman consistently takes an inter-genre stance; a novelist and poet as well as a playwright, he began writing plays for the Dutch radio, took a bachelor’s in international relations, and spent time working in a specialty mathematics bookshop. It requires a complex of lineages to place him in a context. His influences and inheritances span theatrical, poetic, and philosophical traditions. Perloff embraces Wellman by drawing him into a poet’s tradition. Although I too want to think about his poetic language, I want to add a theatrical lineage to this context both in order to lay the groundwork for my thinking about topographical holes, and also to emphasize that Wellman, though described in relation to mainstream playwrights as a poet- or language-playwright, is making theater. A judgment of what is theatrical lies at the core of his aesthetic.
The room to explore language (as opposed to character, plot, psychology) as a primary material of theater comes from a “landscape theater” tradition, which I define broadly as the use of space to reorganize compositional structures, and the use of the textual line to create theatrical value. The term “landscape” indicates the recession of character as a central compositional term, a recession historically coincident with cubism’s similarly decentering redeployment of figure within the spatial field.2 The term is associated with Gertrude Stein, although the concern with landscape predates her own description of her plays as “landscapes” of words in relation to other words.3 According to Elinor Fuchs, two compositional modes followed from the development of landscape theater: “field” composition, where nonhuman elements exist in spatial relation, allowing for non-linear storytelling (a kind of antecedent to Projectivist “composition by field”), and the corresponding modes of attention produced by “the faculty of landscape surveyal” that reads “multivalent spatial relationships” in place of the older lines of “conflict and resolution” (Death 106-7). This new drama is environmental and immersive, a shift in thinking that anticipates the recent turn to ecology and limns a zone of transition between modernism, postmodernism, and posthumanism. In ways that anticipate thinkers from Emmanuel Levinas to Judith Butler, landscape plays create space to think of our being in terms of relation instead of fate.4
Hans-Thies Lehmann has defined this line of new performance as “post-dramatic” theater, but it is useful to recall that movements against theatrical habit often invoke an originary theater against whatever stultified replacement the mainstream represents (what Wellman calls “Geezer Theatre”). Twentieth century nontraditional theater has tended to argue for a recalibration of theater values and recuperation of the intensity of theatrical experience through a rethinking of both materials and structures. Field and landscape compositions have been deeply invested in exploring the physicality of the non-narrative aspects of theater, and I would name Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty and the pedestrian, chance-driven vocabulary of the Judson Dance Theater as poles of the embodiment of the postmodern landscape theater. From Virgil Thomson’s opera of Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts to the work of the Wooster Group or Elevator Repair Service or Nature Theater of Oklahoma, theatrical vocabularies of music, sound, movement, and image offer an alternative structural ground to narrative without abandoning text. This recourse to other vocabularies of thinking offers ways to describe the structure of a play in terms other than a process of revealing that unfolds in linear time. Stein, as the original theoretician of the landscape play, laid a still-relevant and provocative groundwork for this means of composition; indeed, her essay “Plays” might be the most important essay on theater writing since Aristotle’s “Poetics.” Though landscape plays do of course progress in time, the temporal experience can be thought as grounded not in linearity, but in inhabitation. This shift from progression to durational inhabitation is a critical transition in 20th century aesthetics, leading toward installation, “relational” work, and emergent transmission-based art forms.
Fuchs emphasizes a predilection for the static that undergirds modernist landscape aesthetics. This present-tense stasis is created either by actual stillness in plot or action (she names Maeterlinck as the writer of stasis, Robert Wilson as the director of stasis), or by forms of recursion and repetition that create the impression of staying in or returning to one place, allowing new information to proliferate in a scene, rather than move a story forward. Certainly Stein uses landscape as an anti-linear model of thinking. Jane Bowers views Stein’s recourse to pictorial terms as serving a twofold purpose: undistracted by the necessity of keeping up with the story, the viewer of a Stein play is available at every moment to a meditative, contemplative experience based on the present-tense stimulus of the performance; further, offered the image and word elements of theater without hierarchy, the viewer is free to find and retry a shifting set of perspectives (131-2, 140). The playwright’s hermeneutic guidance drops away, inviting the viewer to find her own habits of navigation. No single element of theater—script, scene, costume, light, sound—is necessarily foregrounded; the attention is directionally free, resulting in a self-aware exercise of attention, even attentiveness toward attention itself. Thus landscape plays are incomplete without the mind of the audience; the movement of their attention is an equal part of the substance of the play itself.5 Wellman will preserve this sense that the substance of the play is made in part by the mind of the audience; indeed the mind, conceived extensively as thought and proprioception moving over and through time, and into what he calls Wild Time, is where the Wellman play takes place.
Fundamental to Wild Time is the sense that we do not know where we are going. Like Stein, Wellman uses an acute crafting of verbal impedance to disrupt habitual orientation, but he uses unknowingness differently, not as a renewal of seeing and presence but as a means of opening paths into strange spaces. It is an active retaliation against the foreclosure of meaning that Wellman notes in Stein, and if there is a lineage to be drawn between them, it is on the grounds of respect for her production of openness. Speaking at a symposium on Stein’s plays, Wellman emphasized this aspect of her work:
I do think there’s something about the openness of [Stein’s writing], the fact that it is, in a sense, a landscape. . . . Jonathan Lear wrote a book on Freud and Socrates called [Open] Minded, and he develops this notion of what he calls “the tyranny of the already known,” that we live in a society that is dominated by a particular kind of journalism, which has to do with a deadening sense of knowingness that permeates everything, including the theater. Stein is completely free of this. There is a kind of enormous openness to whatever life brings that I think is terrifying to people because it is open in a sense that is even hard to talk about.
(Rosten et al.17, 20; emphasis mine)
Wellman finds in Lear’s “already known” an analogy to what is known as the “well-made play,” the sociological, psychological, journalistic breed of play that dominates mainstream theater. The well-made play conforms to both psychological realism, which unfolds drama as a series of back-story reveals, and the structure of the dramatic arc as the climax and resolution of a central conflict. But beyond the habit of certain kinds of storytelling, what damns these plays for Wellman is their unwillingness to venture beyond already-known conclusions. In his essay “The Theater of Good Intentions,” Wellman attacks this as a form of high-ground moralism. In “Speculations,” his aphoristic landscape essay on theater’s wild spaces, the “Theatre of the Already Known (AK)” (or Geezer Theatre) appears as a kind of arch-dupe-enemy, hanging onto its “re” spelling as a signal of its unwillingness to abandon the boat of high culture. Instead of finding out once again that incest hurts or that racism is bad, Wellman suggests we allow theater to make us venture into spaces where we don’t already know the answer. If the AK, with its moral and emotional conclusions already on hand, requires no actual thinking, an unknown theater would demand it; the experience would be “open in a sense that is hard to even talk about.”
Wellman identifies openness with terror, among other things. Both characters in and audiences of his plays frequently undergo experiences for which there are no adequate existing vocabularies, that is, they find themselves occupying a hole in knowing. Wellman’s dual register of line and plot allows these holes to appear on multiple scales, so that blank spaces in the experience of knowing seem to be systemic. Within the line, impedance, irregular continuities, and unknowable argots disorient the listener. Within the plot, landscape itself becomes unknown as spaces fail to join or follow predictably, as in Second Hand Smoke when a roof gives way to a desert, or when it instantaneously swallows a person up, or more accurately, “disappears” him, as in The Difficulty of Crossing a Field. By repeating a hole effect in both the line and the plot, Wellman joins the listening audience and the figures within the play in unfamiliar and unnamed experiences. These “holes,” I will argue, open up the play both narratively and receptively, and prepare for the possibility of what Wellman calls “apparence.”
Holes in the Line: Rewriting Sophocles
“Speculations: An Essay on the Theater” is Wellman’s extended, aphoristic organon of the practice of being in the space of theater. He begins by locating the play in the present-tense mindfulness of its happening:
The STRUCTURE of a play ought not to be viewed as a fixed thing but as a mutable one.
I mean, the structure of a play conceived of as a moving point: →→→→→→→→·→→→→→→→→ passing over—or through—time”
(“Speculations” 294)
This mutability undermines the possibility of treating a play as a model of causality and explanation, psychological, social, or otherwise. The difference lies in the relationship of knowing to time: whereas a model eventually completes its own description, the moving point is continuously being rendered anew. This always-moving structure, inscribed in the mutable present tense of the play at the scale of both the sentence and the story, transfers theatrical architecture away from input and outcome, relocating it in the actual space of performance as an active relationship between the perceiver and the play. No longer peripheral to the play as observer or consumer, the mind of each viewer is actually part of the thing itself: “our mindfulness completes the equation” (298). Unclosed, the completion that mindfulness offers is a share in a feedback loop moving “over—or through—time.” The concept of mutable structure suggests that a play should nowhere signal its total form; the parts should not echo an already known (or eventually knowable) whole. Thus Wellman is a playwright of mereology, the mathematical field that studies the relationship of part to whole. Where the classic Aristotelian model of theatrical narrative builds its sequence on a stable base, allowing the rising action, climax, and falling action to progress uniformly toward closure, Wellman presents an anti-conclusive mereology. Instead of compassing a whole, Wellman leads us into holes, holes where theater can finally happen.
If we accept the axiom that a Wellman hole fundamentally removes us from knowing where we are or where we are going, then the holed line prepares this form of disorientation. Paired with abrupt shifts and slips in the plot’s landscape, Wellman performs a smaller slipping away from the recognizable and stable whole operative at the scale of the sentence. These small slips undermine the stable experience of knowing where we are, and so reduce the friction that might otherwise slow us down when the plot too takes us suddenly to a place we don’t recognize. Wellman’s Antigone, written in 2001 for the interdisciplinary company Big Dance Theater, exemplifies and dramatizes this slipperiness. On the page, it looks very little like a play: a 12-page column of text without differentiation of voice or stage direction. This Antigone doesn’t adapt the original text of Sophocles, but rather presents itself as if it preceded its prototype; it takes place in the emergence of storytelling, which in turn betokens the emergence of theater. Antigone begins: “Once, at the beginning of time, the three Fates, unpleasant young girls, enacted the story that was to become that of Antigone. The three girls played all the parts with hats instead of masks, and a whole rack of customary costumery” (105). Without articulating the voices typographically, the play occupies the page as a dense, single column, like an unsorted trunk of costumes and props. All speech flows into all other speech, and often only the shifting grammar of first and third person suggests the possibility of mapping who will say what. The story of judgment and burial is held in thick relation to a description of the activities of three Fates on their way to becoming the three Graces (who will eventually whisper the story into the ear of a puppet named Sophocles). Dances, songs, proverbs, and acts of charm (like balancing an egg on one end) occupy the text’s landscape alongside the emerging story. Wellman preserves something of the choral structure of Sophocles, playing in particular with the chorus Heidegger treats at length in his Introduction to Metaphysics. These three Fates are signally concerned with man’s strangeness, and within the density of the narrative and its intercalated acts of charm, the original chorus’s question—what is stranger than man?—recurs as Wellman’s refrain.
The evanescent effect of Wellman’s holed line becomes apparent in reading his chorus on strangeness against that of Sophocles. The moving point of the play, as it passes through the chorus, does indeed slip “over—or through—time,” impeding any coherent survey. In this way Wellman’s chorus works against the traditional sense of the Greek Chorus as grounded in a stable, common voice. In Sophocles’ play, the first chorus describes the efforts of man against the world by presenting a sequence of images that accrue as contemplative objects embodying the concept of man’s uncanniness. Sophocles offers his audience a series of images that can be held in constellation around the concept of wonder. “Man” as object of thought stands at the center of the picture, with his resources and ambitions drawn in around him. The chorus observes strangeness with great lyricism without, however, enacting it. This observational perspective disappears as Wellman renders the same chorus. He constellates strangeness not with a legible series of emblematic images but with words of similar sound. The relationship of words to other words creates a streaming sense of strangeness by evading any focal point:
A Chorus: Of all things strange, humankind / is the most strange. / The cat’s cradle / is news to the spider, / for all things go round and round; for / I was a stranger and you took me in; for / I was a stranger and you took me not in; for / / straw straw straw, / straw shows which way the wind blows, / and an empty belly thinks the moon is green cheese; for / / (the King of Spiders) / / Up he was stuck /up he was stuck /up he was stuck / and in the very upness of his stuckitude / he fell. / / (Straw, straw, straw, straw.) / / And what I learned from my long / life of spinning string, /life of measuring string, / life of snip snip snip: / / You can’t beat something with nothing.
(Antigone 107)
While the associative manner might at first seem characteristic of schizophrenic speech, Wellman’s chorus is actually controlled through its relentless transitivity as it passes “over—and through” the sound of “st,” pulling us across gaps in sense by an alternative affiliation in sonority. Where the Sophoclean chorus moves in a daisy pattern out into a particular image and back to the central concept of man as wondrously ambitious, Wellman’s chorus returns to the material sound of “st,” “sp,” “sn” prodding a musical sense of focus that slips out of the grasp of a logical one. The spinning of strange with straw, of straw with string, effects the slipping away from the original idea by sliding into focus a new sound displacing the last. This is a curving kind of writing. Each inflection point of that curve is created by a small hole, a gap of sense, in gliding distance.
The poetic work of Wellman’s writing goes beyond foregrounding the transitive. If Stein’s work resituated reading and writing in these flowing spaces in our normal landscapes, Wellman explores the feeling of listening as language veers into a topos beyond the domestic, into spaces punctuated by what I have characterized as holes productive of blank spaces in our present-tense experience of understanding both what we are hearing and where we are. William James, in his gorgeous and still useful description of the experience of language in “the stream of thought,” observes that the usual failure to recognize the transitive feelings of prepositions and conjunctions such as if, and, and but is compounded by the “obverse error” of the supposition “that where there is no name no entity can exist” (“Stream” 246). The refusal to register—to feel—the existence of these “dumb or anonymous psychic states” produces perceived separations in the curve of thought, and so a “greater and greater accentuation and isolation of the substantive parts” (246). If Stein wrote sentences that demanded attention to words of transition and relation, Wellman’s sentences demand attention to these “dumb or anonymous psychic states.” These places are literally dumb, “open in a sense that’s hard to talk even about.” We have no words to compass the gaps, and as the play unfolds in front of us, no time to try to generate any. This is the crux of the holed line—it moves us through spaces we can’t name without giving us time to find new bearings.
In the chorus quoted above, I mark three different strategies for enforcing this attention to “anonymous” spaces. Sliding alliteratively and homophonically from “strange” to “string,” he undermines the isolating tendency James describes by continually iterating a common sibilance, insisting on a relation that might otherwise go unfelt. But what is the feeling of relation in the line, “I was a stranger and you took me not in; for / / straw straw straw”? This strange yet particular interval is the first of three transitive “anonymous psychic states” in this chorus that recur throughout Wellman’s writing in the form of inhabitable absences or “holes.” We are given a transitive word “for,” and so are escorted, as it were, across the gap between “you took me not in” and “straw straw straw.” But the space of relation between “I was a stranger” and “straw straw straw” is illegible; we must absorb the feeling of that emptiness, and keep moving alongside the chorus. Wellman’s critics claim a non-sense in these spaces, but it is the sense of the nothing that we must find. Alongside a willingness on the part of the audience to grapple with spaces of difficulty, staging that uses non-textual senses to ground our sense that we are somewhere (strange and anonymous, but somewhere), and not nowhere, is necessary to the success of these small glides and gaps. The second type of hole is the literal image or mention of one; in this chorus, one that trips us and that we then fall into: “in the very upness / of his stuckitude / he fell. / / (Straw, straw, straw, straw.)” We understand the relation between the two places as a drop. The third type inverts the hole by energizing the anonymity surrounding seeming solidity by temporarily landing in a place of familiarity, creating what Big Dance Theater co-director Paul Lazar referred to as a “rugged island” in a personal interview. The stability of the proverb “[y]ou can’t beat something with nothing” exists as an island surrounded by empty space that offers relief in our disorientation. Wicked proverbs and notations bearing a resemblance to proverbial wisdom are an ongoing resource for this island-building; the sound of wisdom and of age can be soothing and grounding. Fuchs recognizes recursion and repetition as a landscape writing strategy, marking or circling around a place even in the absence of literal landscape elements, a territory-making function that resembles what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call the “refrain,” a kind of hybridized musical-topographical event. In one of Antigone’s later choruses, a list of fallacies provides a temporary sense of territory through recursive iteration. Taking a second stab at the question “what is more weird than man,” this chorus tries to ground itself in logic only to find weirdness again underfoot:
The hole and the patch should / be commensurate, as the / dog to his man should be / obedient. It is as if I / ask you to prove this bicycle / belongs to Hector, and you reply / “All the bicycles around here / belong to Hector”; or the / / fallacy of too many questions, the / fallacy of affirming the consequent, or the / fallacy of denying the antecedent, or the / fallacy of hasty generalization, or the / fallacy of irrelevant conclusion, or the / fallacy of misplaced concreteness, or the / fallacy of many questions, or the / fallacy of accident; or the fallacy of bad faith. / / What is more weird what is more weird / than red feather than black kettle / what is more weird.
(113)
This refrain of fallacies provides a temporary perch, but no sooner is it established than the line crumples and reveals that we are still circling the perimeter of the question of weirdness. Antigone is full of these refrains, created through the effect of eddying in the flow of Wellman’s language. These eddies, within the sea of greater strangeness, offer themselves up as perches. Through the territory-making strategy of the refrain, they define a ground and offer a footing. Sometimes he moves on from these spots back into the sea of the story, in which case they function as an index of drifting thought that hovers around the plot. At other times he uses the rest offered by the island to slow down the story so that we become aware of an incoming phenomenon. Though they rarely hold, these islands prevent Wellman’s plays from becoming too oceanic to follow. In our conversation about staging Antigone, Lazar emphasized the necessity of finding every anchor point of familiar sense, both these kinds of aphorisms that sound familiar and concrete descriptions of action. He deployed the image of an island chain to describe the skeleton he and Annie-B Parson used to ground the strange assemblage device of the play’s action, so as to allow the audience a sense of freedom in thinking without passing a degree of lostness from which they were unlikely to return.
Intense Absence
Wellman’s chosen handbook on holes is Roberto Casati and Achille C. Varzi’s Holes and Other Superficialities, a text that attempts a realist description of holes from ontological, mereological, topological, and morphological standpoints.6 Casati and Varzi describe themselves as “hole realists.” The central thesis of the book is that holes do exist as “immaterial bodies” that are always parasitic to hosts, but that “[h]oles cannot be the only things around” (34, 193). A hole cannot be its own host; it must be a hole in something. But within that something, the hole is an absence. To think about a hole, we must “[t]hink negative” (189). William James similarly locates experiences of blank spaces as integral to the experience of thinking, placing the experience of what he calls “substantive” and “transitive” thought alongside the experience of “dumb or anonymous” states in the curve of consciousness. Our vocabulary does not contain everything it is possible to think and feel. Rather, writes James,
namelessness is compatible with existence. There are innumerable consciousnesses of emptiness, no one of which taken in itself has a name, but all different from each other. The ordinary way is to assume that they are all emptinesses of consciousness, and so the same state. But the feeling of an absence is toto coelo other than the absence of a feeling. It is an intense feeling.
(“Stream” 251-52)
Through the skips and gaps of his lines, and the slipperiness and evanescence of territory underfoot, Wellman gives this “intense feeling” of “an absence” an analog in stage time: the pause. His plays abound with variants of the direction: “Pause. Silence. Pause.” Both holes and pauses are repeated figures in his work, standing for each other in a “compact between special instance and wild time” (“Speculations” 301). Never merely a slowed down response in an otherwise continuous action, Wellman’s pause is a drain, a way of evacuating a scene.
If the anonymous relation between things animates Wellman’s poetics at the level the line, as we have seen in the Antigone chorus, it does so as well at the level of the scene. Bad Penny, a site-specific play for Bow Bridge in Central Park, culminates in a pause that so evacuates the scene of its namable sense that it becomes a space of terror, dramatizing the onset of namelessness (the incomprehensible) by evacuating its landscape of certainty. The play has only one actual event in a plotted sense: the Boatman of Bow Bridge comes to take away the man who has picked up the bad penny. Otherwise, the text is a sequence of stream of thought monologues set into the specific landscape of Central Park’s Bow Bridge. Initially focused on actual landscapes slightly askew (of the sky, the park, the fictional near-by gas stations), the poetic imagery becomes increasingly disordered through the addition of a chorus speaking alongside the individual characters. The effect is that of a strange interval, where the relation of speakers to other speakers remains obscure even as it is enforced compositionally by their juxtaposition. As the play nears the happening of its one event, the First Man, who has the bad penny, declares his belief in “cheese. . . crud. . . power. . . bad shoes. . . insects. . . goop. . . gunnysacks. . . tar. . … furballs. . . cardboard. . . ooze. . .” while a chorus hidden in the bushes chants, “Incomprehensible, the bridge. Incomprehensible, the puddles. Incomprehensible, the sky. Incomprehensible, the hats. Incomprehensible, the thumbtacks. . .” (146). When the boatman arrives, all sound stops. The man, after “a blank moment of horror,” climbs into the boat and is taken away by the boatman (146). After a landscape of language, this event is most terrifying in its silence. Bad Penny‘s drama is the experience of the blank place, the hole.
Its chorus resorts to proverbs to cure the silence: “as you sow, so shall you reap; a bad penny always turns up; nature abhors a vacuum; thought is free; the squeaking wheel gets the grease; today you, tomorrow me; there are more ways of killing a dog than choking it with butter” (148). Across the (semi-) recognizable shape of proverbial aphorism, the First Woman layers a last monologue rife with contradiction: “For all things beneath the sky are/ lovely, except those which/ are ugly; and these are odious/ and reprehensible and must be/ destroyed” (148). As the chorus continues to speak their proverbs, the First Woman speaks to uncertainty:
For the Way is ever difficult to discover
in the wilderness of thorns and mirrors
and the ways of the righteous are full
strange and possess strange hats and
feet. For the Way leads over from the
Fountains of Bethesda, where the Lord
performed certain acts, acts unknown to
us, across the Bow Bridge of our human
unknowability, pigheadedness, and the
wisenheimer attitude problem of our
undeserving, slimeball cheesiness. . .
(148-9)
The language of the chorus and the First Woman stands in an unnamed and perhaps unnamable relation. There seems to be no reconciliation in the polarity of the choral effort to create solidity and the First Woman’s acquiescence to the strange way that leads us out of these solid places. This relation is not “unnamable” in a Beckettian sense so much as resistant to the possibility of measuring and coding the relationship. Its resistance fosters a sense of human smallness; the “Bow” of the bridge’s name begins to evoke the act of bowing and the environment seems charged with a power that might eclipse the humans trying to orient themselves in it. After the “blank horror” of the First Man’s removal, the play restarts only to hang suspended in strangeness. Submissively respectful to “the Bow Bridge of our human unknowability,” we arrive at an almost abject, tragic tone of “utterly craven, totally lost, desperate and driven incomprehensibility” (149). The feeling of absence is an intensity, and so a presence; phenomenologically, it is a hole.
Wellman also creates the “intense feeling” of “absence” with an inverse process: inscrutable naming in an alien language. His plays abound with technical vocabulary that borders on hoax, creating an intensity tinged with a suspicion that the strangely named thing is in fact an unrecognizable object from a vocabulary we can never hope to know (as with Albanian Softshoe, when the second act reveals that the living room drama unfolding in the first act was a soap opera on the eighth moon of Saturn; what do we call it now?). In the opening scene of The Lesser Magoo, Torque, an office flunky being interviewed for an indeterminate job, is quizzed on his technical grasp of a mysterious trade:
Curran:
Sir, do you know what Crowe’s Dark Space is?
Torque:
Sure, it’s the place where the One He Refused to Meet encountered the Crocodilian Mahoon and therefore lays an egg. Quite a large egg, in fact.
Curran:
And are you sure of that?
Torque:
Well—that’s what I was taught at Princeton. School of Upper Malabar Philocubist and Macrurous Studies.
(101)
If these names seem merely goofy, the scene as it progresses replaces play with terror. We do not know the meaning of these words, and so when they give way to something violent and unexplained, the pleasure of their seemingly comic invention is replaced by threat. Torque’s quizzing culminates in his completion of “Presley’s Title One Rogation Exercise” by naming the “tools of the Lesser Magoo”: Whisk broom, Valve trumpet, Tom and Jerry Tongs, Chattahoochie Star-Toothed Harrow, Number six parting tool, tub chair, Klein bottle, Oboe, Hip-boots, Hacksaw, Clothes tree, Plunger, Jigger-chaser, St Louis Double-Hinged Rainbow-Roof, Ramses Motorized Lawn Cable, and Obeah-Man Refluent Bow and Arrow (103-5). Having succeeded, he is allowed to visit the water cooler. After a nearly wordless four minute pause during which his interviewers recline with their eyes covered by handkerchiefs through an epic (in stage time) silence, Torque returns. The stage direction reads,
Something terrible has happened to him. He looks like he has seen a ghost. Perhaps his own. He has vomited, soiling his shirt and jacket. His left shoe and stocking are gone, and the foot is bloody. Tremblingly, he crosses the room, leaving bloody splotches; and quietly sits as before.
(106-7)
The puzzle of what has happened to Torque goes unnamed and unexplained, another hole in the plot, the bodily violence of which dramatizes the intensity of this namelessness. Instead of offering an orienting sense of order, the plenitude of technical terms that has filled up this scene repels the audience away from the surface of impenetrable language. In the increasingly disturbing imagery of the office landscape—a closet door swings open to reveal Torque’s predecessor swinging from a noose—the substantive quality of the argot dissipates, becomes threateningly unknown. In this way the impedance to our smooth understanding of the play’s language aids Wellman’s disturbing and disorienting effects. This impedance that insists on our awareness of the play’s written surface marks Menippean satire as one of Wellman’s writing modes: inescapably, we must consider our own (in)comprehension.
Hoole’s Hole7
I have thus far spoken mostly about the local, line-level effects of Wellman’s prose, a focus I’ve sustained in order to signal two separate relations. The first is the relation of Wellman to concerns outside his own plays: particularly the landscape, or we could say the poetic, tradition in theater. I have shown that the license of a non-linear approach to stage speech, described amply by Stein as the relation of words to other words, is taken up by Wellman to disorient and destabilize, particularly in relation to our ability to know what is going on, and how we should be receiving it. The second and more important reason for my sustained investigation of the Wellman line has to do with the microcosmic environment of his plays as preparation for the effects of the macrocosmic. Recall the opening axiom of “Speculations”: “The STRUCTURE of a play ought not to be viewed as a fixed thing but as a mutable one. I mean, the structure of a play conceived of as a moving point . . . passing over—or through—time” (294). If structure is mutable and not encompassing, then there is no relation of part to whole in which the micro signals and predicts the shapes of the macro, or gradually accretes to fill in a coherent picture.
How, then, is that part-whole relation drawn? The description of a play’s structure as “a moving point” means that the larger environment we inhabit is continuously reconfigured as that point moves in time. If it does not work to fill in the overall structure incrementally, might the line, as the local environment of that moving point, create a condition of thinking rather than indicate a framework? Might the weirdness of the line be necessary to our ability to move alongside the larger action of the play? For only once we are unsettled will we find ourselves available to fall into Wellman’s holey plots. In other words, is it possible that the larger action of the play wouldn’t work without our thinking being primed for more radical disorientation by the small hollows and rebuffs in the lines? “Speculations” supports such a claim. The topographical figure at the heart of that essay is the space surrounding the straight line of the known, a space Wellman variously names “phase space,” the space “perpendicular to the known,” “the strange,” the “radiant,” the “beyond,” “Hoole space,” “Hoole’s Hole,” and the space of “howling.” The space of theater cannot take place along the line of the already known (only theatre can happen there). “Speculations” thus describes the theatrical as taking place beyond our knowing, if not beyond our feeling. I have described this space as a “strange hole,” and at this juncture it is necessary to think more deeply through what a hole is, and in particular how a hole could be something in the first place.
Fields of Emptiness Filled by Strangeness
Wellman takes up Casati and Varzi’s provocative “hole realism” by making holes in the host of known. Leaving the sentence for a larger scale of analysis, we can find this parasitic growth in Wellman’s description of what happens to structure in the course of theater. Wellman differentiates between two kinds of structure, just as he elsewhere claims two kinds of time, clock time and “Wild Time” (“Speculations” 305). These pairs follow the same distinction. In the geezerly theater of “appearance,” where we can only watch passively what we already know going on in front of us, structure is a reference to some other, presumably better, play. In the theater of “apperception,” or in Wellman’s coinage, “apparence” — a theater that cannot take place without our mindfulness, a theater that does not know where it is going — “all [conventional] structures fall down in their folly” (303). It is the event of this falling away of the known that makes possible the appearance, and so the “apparence” of a space beyond convention. After the collapse of the known:
A tear appears.
(A tear as in air, not a tear as in ear.)
A tear appears and it is:
A
→
→
such that a gap, or discontinuity, appear
? B
in the continuum.
(“Speculations” 303)
This discontinuity is the beginning of a Wellman hole, that parasitic “field of emptiness” that negatively produces itself within the known (Casati and Varzi 177). “Hoole’s hole” seems to take up Casati and Varzi’s mandate to “think negative.” This negative expanse is not necessarily empty; negative within the space of the host, the hole is fundamentally fillable. A filled hole doesn’t cease to be a hole, for some discontinuity still exists between the hole and the “hole-lining,” or the edge surface(s) of its host. (Casati and Varzi consider hole, hole filling, and hole host as separate entities.) Likewise Wellman’s space in the hole of the known is filled, of course, with what we don’t know: the strange. The strange is “perpendicular to the four dimensions of familiar appearance” (“Speculations” 296), a ray that shoots from the known into the unknown. In perceiving the strange, we find that we have somehow gone off our grid and are moving in a space of n dimensions: “So STRANGENESS is what fills Apparence and, thus, is what keeps us there, where we find ourselves” (296). Where we find ourselves is “phase space,” in physics an ideal space mapping all the possible conditions of a dynamic system. In Wellman’s speculative analogy, phase space is seemingly a space where determination of any particular state is impossible. If all possibilities are present, and those possibilities likely exceed the “four dimensions of familiar appearance,” then a drama that “unfolds” in phase space “cannot be told in terms of plot” (295). What happens in phase space is the event of “Apparence,” a showing-forth. “Apparence” is Wellman’s translation of Kantian “apperception” in which something new comes be known, or perceived. Apparence, filled or configured by strangeness,8 is what can happen in a Wellman hole, and the “doing of Apparence” constitutes the purpose of theater (297). That we find ourselves in strangeness, and not merely looking at it, signals the ceremonial function. We are active: “The proposition I do not know what I am doing while in the act of doing I do not know who I am or what is not tautology; this proposition reveals an exchange of charm for strangeness. A supercession of apperception by the force of the square of what lies off; off there, and is radiant (and is the Radiant)” (301). As we do what we do not know we are doing, we participate in the unknown. Wellman thus reveals his theater as a project of open mindedness. Finding ourselves in strange places, we can experience genuine newness in our thinking. This new experience is “crystalline”; it is an event in thinking, and not an idea. The event, rather than producing new knowledge, produces an “epiphany” which is for Wellman an opening, or expanding, of space: “drama is an epiphany, something opens up. Something shows itself” (339).
A variant of James’s “dumb or anonymous” experience, the epiphany is also something beyond vocabulary. Whatever shows itself cannot be absorbed by language and knowing, but rather remains outside of description. In his plays, Wellman traces the contours of that opening up, or in hole-realist terms, the “hole lining,” in a kind of spatial notation. The apparence cannot be scripted, but its space can be prepared and it can be beckoned. In this sense, Wellman’s plays “do” apparence, and in this sense they are ceremony. “Ceremony,” writes Wellman “is the nonlinear optic on the moment. Ceremony is the basic form of the theatrical” (340). Those plays of his, like the Crowtet cycle, that follow a plot—weird but essentially narrative—have characters encountering holey spaces where strange things happen: clearings in the middle of the forest, horror-filled closet doors swinging open, vast open plains. In these plays the plot’s topography provides a figure that is replayed in the space of thinking in the same way that a musical harmonic note also produces “overtones,” or an additional set of frequencies that are multiples of the base frequency sounding simultaneously with the main tone. The overtone series of Wellman’s hole poetics sounds in the line, the plot’s topography, and in the receiving mind of the audience. Who knows what other registers it sounds on? The hole can be thought of as the interior space of a ceremonial bell, “sounded” when “a tear appears.” Not merely spaces or gaps, these holes go beyond the interruption of sense: they produce negative environments, or “immaterial bodies.”
In a philosophical play like Antigone, where speech is not always assigned to a character position, the figure of the hole is folded into the descriptive language that carries reports from beyond the events on the ground; the holes and wildness in this imagery help bring the proprioceptive sense of holes and wildness near. Antigone, for example, describes her experience in the wild spaces beyond the coordinates of the basic story. The action of the story is initiated by the appearance of a logical notation “!∃,” which Wellman defines as “there exists a unique situation.” In the notes to the play, Wellman asks that all parts be played by the three Fates–with the exception of this unknown god, who we can verbally account for as “E Shriek” or “the Shriek Operator” (Antigone 105). If all parts are to be played by the three Fates then this unknown god is unplayable; it isn’t a part. E Shriek then is immaterial, a transmission, a figure whose presence indicates the opening up of a communicating tunnel from here to “→ ? B.” E Shriek initiates the play’s possible commerce with wild spaces. The burial of Polyneices is an event beyond attribution, occurring in the company of an immaterial body:
Unknown god as a bodiless shadow approaches. As a swirl of fabric. I am the Shriek Operator. !∃. I am the unique situation. I am the uncanny and have come to this place, place crowded with corpses and the stench of death. I am the Shriek Operator and am very pleased with all this slaughter, this horror, this misfortune. Misfortune out of contrast, sprung hinges, what creaks, what is fundamentally broken. Sand pours without anyone willing it. Pours from above. From the sky. Something is covered. Something mangled and horribly dead.
(106)
!∃Shriek in Big Dance Theater’s Antigone at Dance Theater Workshop, New York City, December, 2002. Used by permission. !∃, “an unknown god as bodiless shadow,” speaks from an intermediate point in space between the two stage agents of its voice: Tricia Brouk, leaning backwards and draped with “a swirl of fabric,” who mouths the words, and Leroy Logan who delivers the text into the microphone. The effect is not that of the appearance of a character, but of the reception of a voice, transmitted into the space of the play.
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The Greek drama of incommensurate mandates becomes a ceremony of lost metrics. This initiation of the story as an action unfolding from an unauthored event creates, from the moment this play starts moving, a sense that the world of its setting is permeated by acts that have no cause and seem to come from elsewhere, acts we can neither know or account for. At the crux of the drama it is precisely the presence of the “tear (as in air)” that allows for Wellman’s epiphanic drama of opening to occur. If we have been experiencing strange eruptions of the beyond into the space of the story, now we begin to move out of that space through the same tears. The movement into the space beyond the hole occasions a paradox that unsettles language. Antigone, buried alive, “witness to her own death. . . . [a] stranger in the house of being,” has undone the names of both living and dying; she inhabits a nameless space (114). Both there and not there, she has been buried in phase space. Here Wellman’s description of the opening up of space is quite literal. “I am going deep into a hole,” Antigone announces. “Deep in a hole and come out the other side” (114).
This theatrical moment creates an enveloping tone in describing what cannot be seen in the four dimensions of the room, perceptible only in that space of open-mindedness where we do not know where we are going. “We are peripheral to, to appearance,” writes Wellman. “We are central to the apparence as it enfolds us in Hoole Space” (“Speculations” 303). In this enveloping space, “Night says no to day. Silence. Pause. A small unpleasant animal crosses the cast emptiness of infinite spaces. . . . Silence. We behold, for the first time, the curvature of the earth. Someone looks out and holds and egg.” The play descends into stillness: “Alone and cold. No one to love her. No one to protect her. Nothing but stillness. Stillness laying waste. The laying waste of stillness. Now she is the focal point of stillness” (Antigone 114-15). From this extraordinary compass point Wellman lays down three transitive pulses in the felt direction of thought, their simple repetition typographically isolated on the page:
And
and
and
and the gods are coming. Unknown ones and the unseen.
(115)
These transitive “ands,” without substantive nouns to offer coordinates, perform a kind of essential “and” function, joining with the possibility of whatever could be beyond it. Steering out into space, in the incredible quiet of this opening, these “ands” open in preparation to receive the strange. What we find, in that space, is a series of hollows, negations, silences, strange appearances, and songs: emptiness laced with charm. Haemon appears in the sky, falling on his own sword while “[t]ime passes unconcerned” and”[n]othing moves us” just as “[n]othing moves Antigone. . . because we are no longer what’s called ‘human’” (116): on the other side of this hole we are somehow negative if not negated. Songs occur as refrains, marking out space:9 “Bubba tubba bubba tubba bubba tubba bup . / / I am the kind of girl tired of always being wise / I am the tin cat tied to my own damn tail. . . . Slow fade to black in which we hear them sing the song over again till they get it right. More right. Over and over. Silence.” Hollows are filled by slow things: “Pause. In which Time becomes a one-legged crow. Crow on a withered bough” (116). Immaterial bodies are perceived without being seen: “One senses the presence of an unknown god. Then another. Then another” (117). From these glides, rounds, and hollows, Antigone reports from the inside of a luminous rock, a radiant space on the other side of that hole. Wellman again makes the topography of the story a figure for our movement of mind:
And I slipped out the back and I made myself very small and I slipped out the back way and when I awoke. I was in a different place, a thin place, as though it were the place of a compass focus. And the lines of force radiated out from my heart in all directions and I could feel these lines of force as though I were a god and not merely a nasty girl, a girl tired of being the wise one. Radiated out from my still beating heart.
(117)
Didi O’Connell in Big Dance Theater’s Antigone, Dance Theater Workshop, New York City, December 2002. Used by permission. The staging’s fluency and its rapid alternation between theatrical vocabularies create, in the sudden shift between dance and text, a thin, tight focus that supplements the text. We find ourselves on an island in the space of the theater.
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The language of description and report allows Wellman to fold the topographical models of phase space and Wild Time he describes in “Speculations” into the story itself.10
The reality, or materiality, of the story takes place simultaneously in the space described by the play and in the space of mind produced by giving attention to it, differentiating this work from the theater traditions that precede it. The stage space itself is a magnetizing element, but it is not the only space of action. Stagings of Wellman’s work filled by those elements of theater that do not tend to invite a sense of conclusion—dance, image, song, sound—create an environment for the play to happen that shrugs off the habit of either the model (traditional realism) or the spectacle (which traffics in the commerce of desire and pleasure between the stage and the audience). We need the stage as the hole needs the host. The play needs us; “it is completed by our mindfulness” (“Speculations” 298). These joinings, across genre, across materiality and immateriality, sometimes rather demoniacally across species, across the known and the unknown, constitute Wellman’s pneumatic landscape, a landscape that calls for multiple metrics that communicate through tears in their own surfaces. In our “fundamentally broken” world, ceremony—which is not to grasp but to stop grasping, to find ourselves in the position of a radiant compass point and not just nasty little girls—will save us from so much junk knowledge, “from our own wrath, and the odium of our good intentions” (“Speculations” 341).
This saving ceremony is invoked in Infrared:
FOR all things are Holy to me—see that
you follow the way of your Y to the
site of your X, for that hollow will be
the place of your hallowing;
For I am called X, and dwell in the holes
of fire you call Sun and Moon; and in all
the blazing, starry holes that the night
is drilled with. . . .
FOR I am difficult to grasp;
FOR any natural act, if hallowed, leads to me;
and nature needs people for what no angel
can perform—its hallowing—and in especial,
the hallowing of its hollows and holes.
(49-50)
Here is a landscape vision concerned with what is beyond our seeing, beyond the horizon. This horizon is composed not of the literally far, indistinguishable edge of our sight, but by the vague edges of our thinking.
At this “live ceremony [that] feeds on dead ceremony” (“Speculations” 340), we are not observers but receivers, tuning in transmissions from beyond our knowing, something only possible if we learn to hallow the hollows and holes. Theater is a crystal radio kit for our thinking. We become aware that our uncontained minds are receptors for signals no one originated and we can’t account for. This conception of mind is both pre-Socratic and post-humanist: a resistance to all forms of closure in our sense of where thinking comes from and where it goes, it implies a strange extensiveness. In this space where strangeness fills apparence, we are asked to practice our own tuning mechanisms, to extend our frequency array. Wellman’s theater, though it might rail, sputter, and denounce, is not a project of critique, neither is it an object or a thing in itself. Removed entirely from whatever lyric moods we might think of when we hear the word “ceremony,” this is a ceremony of bewilderment officiated by nasty things. This is the world where we find ourselves, says Wellman. We have no idea how weird it is. We have no idea how to see. In his workshop at Brooklyn College, when Mac was pleased with the writing, he would sometimes say by way of compliment, “all the characters have wooden hair.” On a very good day, he might say, “we should take her out and shoot her.” And this is, I suppose, the last note of this essay: that the hole where emptiness is hallowed and maybe something is tuned in is dangerous, and this is good. If our thinking doesn’t proceed through passes of terror, something is wrong.
