Grammar: A Wittgenstein Play

c) 2004 by Julia Jarcho

(excerpt)

Characters:

WIGWIT, a high-level thinker

N, Wigwit’s lover

MAN, the head of operations

WIGWIT

If you stop looking around, you can almost see it: we’re in logical space.

Ineluctably.

To be marked out.

What will happen to... happen cannot be predicted. Nevertheless the possibility is inherent. This is how things are.

This.

[Beat.]

This.

[Stamps.]

This.

Or something else.

[Beat. Stamps.]

The heart of the matter. But not dark or red or damp. Not sticky. There is the way things happen to be and then there is the definite, the essence. It admits of no— there are no mistakes. And everything is final.

[Beat.]

Sometimes I think my resolve will fail.

[Enter MAN with binder, speaking rapidly.]

MAN

Let me tell you this: lumps of cheese, OK, growing and shrinking, suddenly and for no apparent reason and with no apparent cause. Tiny little mice appearing where you don’t expect ’em. Spontaneously generated by the hundreds. We bomb the fuckers but they just keep coming back. How about this: everyone you can see is in terrible pain, OK, but they’re hiding it, even the kids. It rains and then it stops raining and then it starts again. You need money. You need help. For all you know there’s a chasm yawning outside your front door ready to swallow you up. Say you like a good cup of coffee. Well, tell me what it smells like. You can’t! The world is full of people who’d like to barbecue you and when the time comes you won’t be able to ask them not to. Every day he says he’ll come see you tomorrow. He says it every single day. The boiler’s gonna explode, the car’s gonna break down, happens all the time. You’re not wanted here. You turned left when you should’ve turned right. That pencil is as good a weapon as any. Can’t dance. Can’t even raise your arm. Turn out the lights and you can’t see the flowers. Get it?

[Pause.]

What I mean is, you’re on the right track. Who says you can’t lay the rails to infinity? Wigwit my boy I’ve said it before: it’s not the sharpness of your epee that matters in this battle, but the sharpness of your thought, and that my boy is a strange and subtle mechanism, one might even say a visitation in your case. That brain of yours is extraordinary. I’d like to cut it open, see what’s inside, but we all know the one about the goose, and so I’ll have to keep trusting you to produce at the same superior level. And if you don’t mind my making an observation, as I look around I don’t see that certain friend of yours, whatsisname—

WIGWIT

N.

MAN

Nowhere in sight and I have to admit I think it’s for the best. These people are all right, Wigwit, but they blunt the instrument. Socrates: a weird man in many respects but he knew that much. You might say who knows what was really going on under that plane-tree, and I confess you’re right, but then again that’s not our concern. “Yes, Socrates”; “Quite right, Socrates”; “Fuck me, Socrates”? No, I don’t think so, doesn’t gel, doesn’t make much sense, not the kind we’re after. See what I mean?

WIGWIT

Yes.

MAN

Knew you would. We’re working around the clock; nose right up against the grindstone, never did you much good anyway, ’cept to let ’em know who you come from, which is hardly an advantage these days. No time for goofing off so if that’s what you’re about I suggest you call it quits. Not you personally, I’m speaking in general. It’s all in the relation to detail. Don’t take any shit, but at the same time, rigor. Right to it.

WIGWIT

It’ll be easier to work alone.

MAN

Absolutely. Absolutely. A lot of our best work has been done that way. Far from the distractions of the pollutions of the flesh or whatever freak thing you’re into, no offense. “The greatest souls are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues”as the song says. After all there’s a war on, mass destruction, for God’s sake, you can hardly hear yourself think without a foot of concrete between you and all that racket. We’re a solitary bunch, communicate by telegraph mostly. “Thus one sees that buildings undertaken and completed by a single architect are usually more attractive and better ordered than those which many architects have tried to patch up by using old walls that had been built for other purposes,” dot, dash, stop. Cleanliness and precision. No blots. Don’t forget what you’re working for. Never forget that, my young friend. We’ll get to it yet.

[MAN hands WIGWIT the binder and exits. Beat.]

WIGWIT

[with resolve]

N left me today. He has light brown hair on his stomach. His feet are smaller than average. He enjoys music and poetry. He did not lead the Israelites out of Egypt; it was Moses who did so. Once I brought him flowers. I believe he was pleased. N wears a red shirt. Underneath however he is always the same.

[Grasps his own arm.]

Here.

[Thumps his chest.]

Here.

[Grasps his throat.]

Here.

[Drops his hand. Beat.]

As it were.

[Sits down and begins to read from the binder. War noises sound as lights go down.]