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The Mycenae Gate
2019
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July 13, 1977
Midtown Manhattan
Candles roll like feathers on water, bobbing onto stage, all blinkered into blue shadow in the power outage. Set here, lit there, and the play goes on with the actors, half in silhouette, changing colour with every few steps, toward a green candle, away from a gold candle. Curtains fall but the dance of wicks and wax persists. Everybody waits in the auditorium, still caught in the drama of the darkness versus the other darknesses. Something isn’t over yet, whatever it is. Give you time— to realise it’s interactive, and stand now, stroll corridors. A man explains at length everything he enjoys exactly, immediately as he enjoys it. His mind works in perfect pace with his voice, so it works for him. He experiences nothing he doesn’t comprehend. Andy Warhol glimmers past him in the dark, and he says, ‘This is the most thrilling thing that’s happened to me, passing Andy Warhol in the dark’ (86, Diaries). He follows the corridor down and exits by a steel door, headed and footed with searing green light.
Backstage, past the other end, Warhol opens the changing-room of the actress ‘Irene.’ She changes out of costume, into bluejeans. Champagne comes out, as if to say — even though it’s not New York anymore; the darknesses are too many sheets deep, we’re in Mirror New York now — ‘Illusion’s over. Welcome back to New York.’
But the illusion goes nowhere.
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December 13, 1971
Elysium
cassandra and two of her friends are lying together on a flower-bed in the near-dark. purple sky, the flowers glow
she and her friends are a bit drunk. they kiss one another. one of her friends rolls to the edge of the flower-bed. she bites him and says ‘come back.’ he rolls back
later, cassandra touches a new bruise she has. it hurts so much. ‘look at this bruise,’ she says. cassandra is never alone. her friend presses the bruise with a finger. ‘you’re very violent,’ says cassandra, and ‘ow!’
‘i want to make the bruise go away. then i want to make another bruise. i’ll keep making bruises until i make one that’s the same shape as this one. let’s do the game until the bruise is right, until the bruise is the same shape as now’
cassandra takes a photo of her bruise, then lets her friend lay her palm on it. the bruise is gone
‘okay,’ says cassandra’s friend. she punches cassandra
there’s no linear time in elysium. they play for the idea of a day and a half
cassandra lies in the grass. she tried to make a bed (she imagined a bed into being). it wasn’t as comfy as the grass of elysium
she lies in the grass and she thinks about being alive and rolling around in beds when she was alive
if she wanted, she could roll along the grass. she could roll and roll in one direction and never reach the end of the world. she would never stop being comfy
no one pulled cassandra aside and told her what dreams are in elysium. she supposes they’re as real as everything else. she doesn’t know what the difference is between being awake in elysium and being asleep in elysium. she rolls
cassandra rolls
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June 27, 1177 BC
Mycenae
Chariot says we’re in a hurry. Awkward, reckless, clattering war-implement for getting Agamemnon from shore to abode— Is it there’s no time for decorum? Or is this just what Agamemnon’s like? He swings his dick, drives to the divorce-office in a Wrangler. Agamemnon deserves to die but so does every man around here, so, goes the historical-anthropologic refrain, because he’s living then, not now, he also doesn’t. Killing Trojans, sacrificing his children, rape, abduction— these are small misdeeds, facts of life for any man who’s lived long enough. ‘Life’s real complex,’ says Agamemnon, finishing, crushing a Mercury Hard Cider, tossing the can at Cassandra’s feet, another to a litter of six beneath the passenger-seat of the truck. Gets out, throws the door back and doesn’t look, door swings smart-shut and the man swaggers triumphant toward the house, past the oracles and their cawing.
Cassandra doesn’t love herself. Can’t surrender her sympathy for Agamemnon— cursed in moments to blood-gargle his way to legend’s annals, no legacy but duty, the accomplishment of what was expected of him. Nothing greater, nothing less. Any other name could fill his detail— all he’ll be: a sequence of letters that could have been any other. So Cassandra mourns, so— ‘Otototoi popoi da!’ as she kicks Mercuries from her feet and descends the rungs of the war-machine.
It’s not group-sex if the extras are corpses. Then it’s just normal sex plus he has dolls. So, we think about writing Cassandra died in an orgy of blood and bathwater, but it was all simulation. Cassandra’s and Agamemnon’s dead bodies thrown together in the frothing tub, under which Clytemnestra and her new boyfriend fuck, murderous conceit at the vindication of their love, a confirmation sought in mutuality with her old husband and his slave— which he’d never give breathing, and, now dead, doesn’t count. But they tell themselves it does, and the gods don’t bother correcting. Invisibly, justice arcs against them.
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November 17, 1971
Elysium
cassandra rolls and the sea-foam gentles her side. the beach is long and yellow. like a painting of a beach
she sits up and hugs her knees. her eyes can’t stop crying
but she feels like that has nothing to do with her
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August 13, 1965
Midtown Manhattan
‘It’s just,’ says Edie, flats off, feet curled beneath her, gaze wandering past Ondine’s, across the loud haze of Midtown, ‘that there are not many, there’re not many people that are special. There are one or…’
‘There are a few, yes,’ says Ondine, lips’ reflection fidgeting in the vista, ‘there are more, more than me. There’s…’
‘And that’s, that’s undeniably…’
Warhol leans against the leg of the sectional, blinking in silent, Morse dialogue with his tape recorder, and listening. When they get onto the ‘masses of auto-mechanics,’ their implicit slaughter in a dimension-changing war, he remembers his pact, remembers why emotion will never be worth it. My friends are all bad people, he thinks. But I’m not. But why aren’t I? ‘Better not to think about it,’ he says aloud. Edie and Ondine nod, whatever it is, better not to think about it.
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