"Prop State - pt 3

Scene: Noon, jungle

Henri Rousseau stands at a kind of improvised derrick. It has no drill, only the support structure. He wears a full climbing harness and carries ropes.

Rousseau:

I am devoted to the hidden face of American happiness. There is no foe worth overturning that is not first worth painting.
(He fiddles with coupling, attempting to climb the derrick. It is obvious that he is afraid to go above the first bracing, and may be experiencing spells of dizziness and vertigo. Music swells. Baruch de Spi- noza appears and begins to sing as Rousseau unsuccessfully climbs.)

Spinoza: (sung)

In there, Solar anus and political death /
In there, some Ego loss/
In there, some spirit guide/
In there, some burnt ember/
In there, some thrice sinewed boy/
In there, some frame music/

Scene: Evening, factory

Alfred Jarry cleans the gearing on his bicycle. The golden light ricochets around the noiseless fac- tory. There are hollow notes sung from the birds lining the rafters. He addresses a camera mounted high on the factory wall.

Jarry:

Gentlemen, I am building a new survival poetry; the old one was riddled with holes. My poem keeps tipping over; I’m trying to put too many ideas into it. I need to start from the ground up. That’s why I bought this factory; to renew the face of the world. To hold it to its promise.

What is this deep water? I can see only the end of the political age. I shake hands with this man, with that man, and the dumb pleasure of theater dissolves into something resembling theater, but entirely unlike it. Have you heard the story of the orangutan? This stupid monkey, sitting with a pile of dogeared books, his face fat with the pleasures of his cage, his shit neatly stored in a drawer....flexible....would you believe that he could suck himself off? What sort of man runs free? What sort of man has the buying power of his own dick? Anyway, this monkey, this demon seducer, left to his own devices, wrote a novel. The novel, written on black paper, was unpublishable. We asked several, and they agreed. But then there were the calls. The meetings. What have got to lose, they finally agreed. And overnight: a sensation. In short, this fatuous pleasure machine, this hairy man-child had managed something that none of us had been able to conjure: to sketch a new model for production, that avoided all the old economic pratfalls. All the activists, the orchestra owners, the Smith and Wesson holsters, the Volvo-drivers, the stage-managers were forced to admit: they had all been trumped, by this long-toothed soothsayer. The world was new again. The faces were new again. They had become the whole. Even this face. Do you remember?
Is this not the face? Let me come closer.

(Sets down tools) Is this not the face?