Free The Daredevils by Gary Amdahl

desire for pleasure. We actors revel quite rightly in these superficial desires, in the gratification of these superficial desires—that is what we are paid to do. Still, the corpse is a corpse and her cunt is full of maggots. I’m not trying to be outrageous—you know this as well as I do. We all know. What you may not know is that beneath all those layers of pleasures is a primary desire. We may think of it as an original desire. We may think of it as a primal desire. You must show us, if you can, what it is to want food, to want sex, to want to brain another man so you can have his food and his women—but you are exhibiting the superfice. You may bring something to life if you are successful. And that is the great desire you must not confuse with pleasure: simply to be alive.”
    He began weeping again, loudly, with a kind of abandoned happiness, and Charles descended to the stage.
    The stage was high enough so that when Charles came to the leading edge of it he was looking at his actors’ shoes as they shuffled and swept left and right, forward and back. He tipped his head back and called out for everyone to mark out a playing space and begin to go through the motions and whisper the lines of whatever scene marked their entrance into The American. After they’d done so for a few minutes, over the gentle, strange murmuring punctuated by the creak and clap of the boards, he told them to speak up and to slow down.
    From the balcony Sir Edwin shouted. “NOTICE HOW THE NATURE—”
    And Charles took it up, almost as if he were echoing Sir Edwin: “Notice how the nature of what you are doing changes along with the speed, your apprehension and judgment of what you are doing.”
    A few more minutes passed and he climbed up on the stage, moving around an imaginary painting on an easel, speaking Christopher Newman’s first lines of the play—“That’s just what I wanted to see!”—while the young woman who was the imaginary painting’s painter, Noémie, fell in with him.
    â€œNow half again as slow and notice—”
    â€œNOTICE HOW YOUR THOUGHTS STILL LAG BEHIND YOUR ACTIONS, EVEN WHEN YOU HAVE COME NEARLY TO A STANDSTILL!”
    â€œMove as slowly as you can move and still maintain a sense of one single continuous movement and notice how your thoughts still lag behind your actions, which indeed are reactions themselves to something we cannot see, name, understand.”
    â€œASK YOURSELF WHY YOU DO NOT FEEL WHOLE WHEN YOU ARE A CHARACTER!” shouted Sir Edwin, who then began again to sob, loudly—and, it had to be said, histrionically.
    â€œPick a new scene,” said Charles. “Move normally, speak softly.”
    Vera—Claire de Cintré—joined him for their first scene together. Charles spoke his lines with her for a while—“It’s as if there had been a conspiracy to baffle me tonight: we have been kept asunder from the moment I arrived”—then said, “Indeed, as Sir Edwin suggests, you know who you are at the expense of being happy. Ask yourself why that is. Know that you will never be happy until there is no division between you and the other characters. Know that you are sinning when you are isolated and alone on the stage. Know that sin means only that you have missed the point and that repentance means only to change your perspective. You in your isolation have created the other characters and now you are afraid of them, of what they will do, of how you will act in consequence. You created them but you are afraid of being dragged into their lives. Do not be afraid, my actors. Youare living in a constant state of anxiety and anticipation. Change your sinning way: everything is waiting for you, here on the stage, in the character of the other.”
    Again he gave them just a few minutes, two or three, then asked them to slowly and gently cease to speak and move. He asked them to savor the