Free The Daredevils by Gary Amdahl Page A

silence and stillness and yet remember where they were and what they were doing. When they were ready, calm and alert, they were to return to the scenes they had just been acting but include the other characters in the scene, two or three others, reform, as it were, and choose a property that was important to the scene, a chair or an easel.
    â€œYou will never be convincing on a stage, my friends, if you cannot treat your props properly. You must see and use them—and allow them to use you—in exactly the same way you see and use and are used by the other human beings onstage with you. A chair is every bit as miraculous as a human being is. Look at the chair, feel it. It is floating there in space just as you are. Just as the planet does. Its constituent parts are your constituent parts. You may wish to think of yourself as related to your property interdependently. This in truth is how we live. Distinctions between consciousness and self-consciousness, between organic and inorganic are only superficially true and useful. Consider the story the chair will tell: as we are flesh, it is wood, fashioned by a maker in a shop, who got the wood from a timber merchant, who got the wood, with subtle but overwhelming violence, from a tree in the forest. Of course you tell yourself you know where the tree came from: it grew from a seed. Break open the seed: Is it empty or merely invisible? Without water, and soil, and sunlight, what will come of it? What is water? The wave recognizes itself only when it is washed upon a shore. Instantly it vanishes, is withdrawn from the shore into the singularity of the ocean. What is soil? Light? Where does light come from and where does it go to? Does it come from darkness and go to darkness? Does it need darkness in order to claim its singularity? Does darkness need light to claim its singularity? Does darkness come from light and go to light? ‘Brief as the lightning in the collied night that, in a spleen unfolds both heaven and earth, and erea man hath power to say, behold, the jaws of darkness do devour it up. So quick bright things come to confusion.’ All this coming and going implies time and space, a clock and a grid. Who built this clock? Who drew and laid down the grid? Who declared five senses and no more? What is a senseless man? What is a dreaming man? What is man dreamlessly sleeping? What is prior to logic, to reason? Is character, your own and your character’s character, a matter of outward performance and social polish, as La Rochefoucauld would have it, or of inward essence? Where is the Christ who promised to show us what could not be seen? Why was this gnosis banned from our Bible? Where is the Christ of the Upanishads? Why must we hear only Jeremiah when our cities are destroyed? ‘Behold, that which I have built up, will I break down. That which I have planted will I pluck up.’ The worker is hidden in his shop. The work has drawn a veil over the worker. Only on the stage of simultaneous being and not being can we see the work and the worker together.”
    Charles ceases to speak. Slowly the ensemble follows him into silence—and it is only then that they realize the cellist of the continuo group Charles has engaged has slipped in sometime during the weaving and fallen immediately under the spell, providing a single unceasing ground note, moving imperceptibly up to the sharp, then back down to natural, further still to the flat, then up again. No one moves, everyone listens. There are more persons in the theater than he had thought. Children, mostly. Children of the crew, he supposes.
    Vera tries to catch Charles’s eye, but he refuses—or is intent on something else. She wants to see how seriously he has taken himself—taken himself as opposed to what he has spoken of with such bafflingly strange eloquence. She wants him to remember that it is a game. Rather: she wants that belief confirmed in herself. He has either over-rehearsed