You kneel on the floor with two loop pedals in front of you. Above you hangs a projected red curtain and an empty spotlight. you say, “Oh, fuck it,” and hit one of the pedals, which causes The Star of Happiness theme song instrumental interlude to play.
“I was born with a degenerative eye disease called…” you hit the loop pedal twice quickly in order to catch “cone-rod dystrophy.”
“This means that, since I was ten years old, I’ve been going very slowly blind. I’ve occupied many positions on the sight/blindness continuum. I’m more blind than sighted now, but it’s not always been like this. Perhaps for you, going blind is the scariest, or at least one of the scariest, things imaginable. For me, thinking about losing another sense, especially hearing, is really scary.
“When I started reading books by and about Helen Keller, I suddenly developed a ringing in my ear. It was likely psychosomatic. (Wouldn’t have been the first psycho symptom I’ve exhibited.) Around that time, I had a dream: I was Helen, in the last years of her life when she was confined to bed by old age illness. We were insensible to sights and sounds As she had almost always been, but now, unable to move, we were deprived of the incessant, impulsive force that had launched her, a crazy deaf blind caterpillar, feelers electrified and electrifying, meteorically into a world that could not get enough of her, and of which she also could not get enough.”
Behind you on the screen, images of Helen from earlier in the show slowly spin around the projected spotlight, then break away.
“Now, after living nearly ninety years of a life that included such varied occupations as…” you pick up “political activist” and “vaudeville performer” into the loop and continue, “and ” after World War II, after America dropped bombs etc., she became an officially sanctioned, unofficial…” you catch up the following into the loop, “ambassador of American peace and good will,” and continue. “Two million Japanese welcomed her when she visited decimated Nagasaki and Hiroshima. They loved her that much!
“but my dream was set in a time past all that, so that I experienced what it would be like to have a sensory existence that extended no farther than the cocoon like bedding in which we were wrapped. Excepting slight tremors and vibrations through the floor, And the occasional touch of an attending hand…” you hit the loop pedal, “THERE WAS NOTHING.”
“However, in the double visioned way dreams sometimes unfold, I was trapped in her immobility with her and seeing her inert body as if it were an out of body experience, without much height or distance. The perspective was split: both inside feeling out and outside looking in.
“The in-body perspective was that of the cornered small animal trembling with the desire to escape, that of the suddenly quadriplegic wishing impotently to die, that of the tongueless victim left alone to tell her tale.
“While the out of body perspective was that of the achingly detached observer, that of the nonsensical buzzing fly, that of the sole audience at a wake. From here, the bed on which we lie, appears, in my mind’s eye, to be a tabula rasa, our body a lumpy virgin landscape.
“But this is my nightmare, not Helen’s. Helen believed that there was an eternal, heavenly, fully sensing body waiting for her to step into after death.”
You hit the pedal and pick up what Helen says, “It gives me a deep, comforting sense that things seen are temporal and things unseen are eternal.”
You say, “Now she is the star of happiness to all struggling humanity.”
Helen says, “Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.”
You say, “If Helen Keller fell down in the woods would she make a sound?”
Helen says, “I was strong, stubborn, indifferent to consequences. I knew my own mind well enough and always had my way, even if I had to fight tooth and nail for it.”
Helen says, “I am not dumb now.”
You put down the mic and hunch over your workstation on the floor. You feed Helen Keller quotes from one pedal into the other, adding to the increasingly chaotic mix. Above and behind you in the projected visionscape, images likewise become disjointed and frantic.
Helen says, “Every one of us is blind and deaf until our eyes are opened to our fellow men, until our ears hear the voices of humanity.”
Helen says, “It is not required of every man and woman to do or be something great. Most of us have to be content to take small parts in the drama of life.”
Helen says, “I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times; but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers.”
Helen says, “I really care for nothing in the world but liberty, liberty to grow mentally and spiritually, untrampled by tradition and arbitrary standards.”
Helen says, “Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.”
You hit the loop pedal one final time and the theme song plays its refrain, “Wonderful star of light wonderful star of light wonderful star of light…”
You are done. you look up into the audience, then crawl stage left as if you will exit, but stop at the edge to sit and apparently observe the strangely calm cycling of looping fragments. The soundscape grows louder while the lights, almost imperceptibly, grow brighter, until the stage and the audience are drenched in artificial light.
Crescendo.
Whiteout.
THE END
