3

Bells in retrograde

Characters:
ASH Afflicted by strange events.
JUNE Ash’s housemate.
LOU An anthropology student.

A Bird Calling

June enters carrying a bucket.

ASH: Oh hey.

JUNE: Hi! I have a story about today! So we went down to the creek. There were so many frogs.

ASH: What was it like?

JUNE: Dark, steamy, exhausting.

ASH: Sure. (doesn’t seem interested)

JUNE: What’d you do today?
Silence.
Okay then, don’t worry about it. I’m going to bed.

Turns off the light. ASH is alone with the bucket onstage, surrounded by a circle of lit candles.
She looks into the bucket.

ASH: I see the moon sliced into quarters, a silver frog needling in my bloodstream, saying something very important.
To the holy weird moon.
You - are on my left as I walk northwards, telling me to go on.
Knowing what used to be there and should be.
She drinks from the bucket. Sound of bells.

In Retrograde

ASH: Parts of my memory have been rewritten, to the extent that I had re-inscribed the words to the initial song conceived as a retelling of events from a past life I believe I was the main character of a few too many times.

JUNE: You're in a white room dreaming and wearing blue, the rest is up to you, wearing blue is all about the car journey, wherever that’s going and anything you’re listening to – could it be the firmament on fire as you speed to a destination that exists only in your mind – a room where they’re waiting?

LOU: Being Ash and knowing about what they all did is not easy because the train of thought follows yelling of bells all the way up to god I swear! It's a thought.

JUNE: she couldn’t figure out why (it seemed like the Belljars thought) the truth was that Ash had a secret which was that she knew the truth about (XXX) which redacted XXX and XXX redacted YYY. And the Belljars spoke the truth.

ASH: And they were the only other ones who knew redacted.

JUNE: The car journey, the fuzzy car chairs and the music all matter a lot. She’d taken a roadtrip to Melbourne from hometown Bendigo the summer when she broke her arm playing community netball, Melbourne was where she stayed, whereabouts met June at uni, whereabouts she had moved in with her friend June.
She sometimes thought about how there was this old guy dancing on his own before the gig.

LOU: nowadays it was Ash dancing.
She’ll never really know the XXX that redacted YYY as she contemplates the old guy.
The thing about the old guy dancing was that she hadn’t thought about it that much in the initial visit to the retreat for June’s first gig, but at subsequent gigs he’d still been there, she started wondering if she’d see his face before her fading vision as she died or in sleep paralysis. Then rewrote her knowledge of the initial gig so that the guy became more important and part of the mystery. Did June know about the guy? Had he paid the guy to dance? Why did the guy look so much like Jeff Goldblum?

JUNE: The issue with rewriting her memories of the first gig is that she remembers it like a koan.

JUNE: It could be fractured, she knows now, that sheets of something you like drop away, the morning you listen to Unknown Pleasures for the first time, as the final track slips by, you realise that when you dissociated you were correct; your world comes into focus and now you’re arguing with Descartes and parents made of acetate. It seems like all these amazing musicians know what happened except they have got ascension all figured out.

ASH; A fool doesn’t know only that which the fool normally one allows oneself to know but is like a noir hero in that she saw the darker shades when the weird light was turned on.

JUNE: Someone rolling cigarettes in the other corner. The fool wants to talk but she’s been foiled by her inability to be a shadow, a mirror or a wallflower. They have some things in common, but she doesn’t know what she’s doing, thinks through the body, with her hands.

LOU: She doesn’t know how to profit, nor does she count the value of her parts, she’s just ASH, she’s just the main character.

JUNE: The old man’s eyes were closed as he jammed slowly to old-man-rock.
The way I was told it, if you go through enough pain, sometimes you strike gold in your personality, which means you feel happy forever. There’s no way to know if you’ve got it and if you tell anyone you’ve got it they’ll just validate you. I’m not a bad person, just read my mind and you’d know how they’d ordered the moon not to shine. You’re you on the surface but ontologically unaware of your soul. You’re in a sense completely unreal.

ASH: I speak for myself. It’s a thought.

and schizophrenia
ASH: (getting the sentences out of order because she’s losing her mind from too much reading) “A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world. Lenz's stroll, for example, as reconstructed by Buchner. This walk outdoors is different from the moments when Lenz finds himself closeted with his pastor, who forces him to situate himself socially, in relationship to the God of established religion, in relationship to his father, to his mother. While taking a stroll outdoors, on the other hand, he is in the mountains, amid falling snowfiakes, with other gods or without any gods at all, without a family, without a father or a mother, with nature. "What does my father want? Can he offer me more than that? Impossible. Leave me in peace."1 Everything is a machine. Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines— all of them connected to those of his body. The continual whirr of machines. "He thought that it must be a feeling of endless bliss to be in contact with the profound life of every form, to have a soul for rocks, metals, water, and plants, to take into himself, as in a dream, every element of nature, like flowers that breathe with the waxing and waning of the moon."la To be a chlorophyll- or a photosynthesis-machine, or at least slip his body into such machines as one part among the others. Lenz has projected himself back to a time before the man-nature dichotomy, before all the co-ordinates based on this fundamental dichotomy have been laid down. He does not live nature as nature, but as a process of production. There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever. “ This is from James Joyce Ulysses. No wait. Guattari and Deleuze. I think.

Voices like birds calling

(a dark place) (two voices in dialogue, they are fuzzy, like a broken signal playing back on a jittery TV.)
A dark place, like a cave.

A dark place, like a cave.

Two people standing in it.

Two people standing in it.

You can hear their voices.

You can hear their voices. Voices like singing birds. Chatting. Lilting. Chatting. TV static. Voices in the corridor chatting like TV static.

Humming. A distant grinding. Humming. Chatting. Like TV static. A cacophony. Murmuring like waves at the beach.

A third voice appears.
HEY, I THINK I CAN SEE SOMETHING. I CAN SEE TWO PEOPLE DOWN THERE. I CAN HEAR THEM TALKING. I CAN HEAR VOICES LIKE LITTLE BIRDS CALLING OR MURMURING WAVES OR A DISTANT HUMMING SONG. I CAN SEE YOU DOWN THERE. YOU’RE LOOKING INTO THE DISTANCE, AND YOU’RE PACING, YOU CAN STOP PACING IF YOU WANT.
CAN YOU HEAR ME? ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?

I HEAR VOICES
VOICES LIKE BIRDS
VOICES LIKE DISTANT SINGING
A DISTANT HUMMING
OR A BIRD CALL
LIKE A HUMMING SONG
Hello?
I HEAR DISTANT VOICES SINGING LIKE BIRDS CALLING
Did you say something? Where are you? Is someone there?
IS SOMEONE THERE?
Yes I’m here. Say something.
SOMETHING. SAY SOMETHING.
Where are you?
I DON’T KNOW. BUT I CAN HEAR YOU.
I can hear you too! Can you see me? I can’t see you.
I CAN SEE YOU DOWN THERE.
You know you’ve got a lovely voice.
THANK YOU. SO DO YOU.

Thank you. Are you a ghost?
I HEAR VOICES LIKE MURMURING, MURMURING WAVES.
So do I.
I HEAR VOICES LIKE MURMURING, MURMURING WAVES.
I know.
------------------- (Overlapping)
I HEAR VOICES
VOICES LIKE BIRDS
VOICES LIKE DISTANT SINGING
A DISTANT HUMMING
OR A BIRD CALL
LIKE A HUMMING SONG

The abandoned voice cries out.
Uncertain – reaching – searching, uncertain, lost, stung, confused, wondering
Break! Broken! Empty! Grey! Blank! Shut! Gone! Terrible! Awful! Terrible! Break! Broken! Untouchable! Empty! Awful! -------------
Us!
Yes.
Here.
Yes.
A dark place
Yes.
Two people standing in it.

Yes.
You can hear their voices.
Yes.
Hey, are you listening?

Yes.
No you’re not. You can’t hear what I’m saying to you. You’re not listening.
I’m listening.
Then talk to me. talk, talk, talk, talk talk talk. You’re not listening. You can’t hear, you’re not here. Blank! Broken! Empty! Grey! Blank! Shut! Gone! Terrible! Awful! Terrible! Break! Broken! Empty! Awful!
Hey. Are you out there? Are you listening? Where are you? Where’d you go? Could you really hear me? Were you a dream? Just a dream?
Terrible.

Where are you? Are you listening? Come back, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.
I CAN HEAR YOU. I’M HERE. I CAN HEAR. ARE YOU HERE?

You’re there.
A good place.

Voices like bells

ASH is the only one visible on stage.

THE VOICE: Ash?
the voice is comforting, familiar, but doesn't sound human -(vocoded/distorted)

ASH: Who are you?

VOICE: I can't tell you that.

ASH: You sound like June.

VOICE: Okay.

ASH: June, you're - here!

VOICE: Close to working it out.

ASH: I can ask you the truth, you could tell me.

VOICE: What did I know that you want me to say?

ASH: What was happening - at the time.

VOICE: Could you be more specific?

ASH: We’re in a dark place but there's light now. It was like that. You and I were in the dark.

VOICE: What sort of light?

ASH: A bad light. The weird light that turns off in the sky.

VOICE: The stars? The moon?

ASH: A reflection of the moon in your drink and it goes down like swallowing something alive.

VOICE: I feel poetic.
I wanted to show you my work.

ASH: After your band broke up, I wanted to show you the story I was writing. What did you do?

VOICE: Stay away from you.

A song begins to play

ASH: JUNE, I'm sorry.

VOICE: Look….why don't you talk to him?

Lights up on a crowded bar, JUNE's playing in the band. The bar is filled with gig goers.

ASH: I have to go -

She heads for the door but is blocked by a guy dancing slowly on his own in the middle of the room.

Sorry -

She makes a beeline for the door. The guy doesn’t seem to notice, her, but vanishes into the crowd after she leaves.
The song finishes. JUNE and LOU pack up their stuff while talking over sounds of the bar.

JUNE: I think we played well. Good job team.

LOU: Sure. Did you see Ash?

JUNE: Did I see Ash? Why?

LOU: I’m worried about her. You know, sometimes worry is like a prism.

JUNE: Sometimes it’s like a dream.

The scene shifts subtly, or wildly.

JUNE’s Dream

JUNE: I left the bar early and I had disturbing dreams.
I was playing the character of the rival, holding a flashing weapon.
A cold moon dripping into frog soup.

ASH: the dream was a pocket of warmth floating through the outer limits, an abbey on the moon. the dream went to seven rooms and pancakes coiled the taste of dark sweet grape. the radio moved his neck. She had a pristine life, too.

LOU: he became a dragon in the dream, after his birthday. lost in a maze of technicalities, it takes time to unweave them, and he unweft some people who were jesus objects. thank god he was misreading god’s fingers on the clouds.

JUNE: the danger evaporated and I looked at some modernist paintings. There was a garden and I wanted to know what she’d done. The taste of dark grapes remaining in memory. The living rooms call, all shut. and I don’t know what was hard or good - the transplanted living room that lived in the future and came back to the party to lose everything you understand. Someone sent me a song like Amaranta’s shroud, now I listen to it with my housemate, and I listened to it walking through the ti trees, to the cove, strange how back then I knew how she felt.

LOU: walking down the shore, forgetting the dreams, just thinking of music.
ASH: And that is the long and the short of trying to write a song, to catch a sparrow, writing this from a crystal cathedral in a place where all the washing is put out in the rain.
JUNE: If you look at the lyrics it could probably apply to you and it probably does because the Belljars know you in sovereignty - but not to Ash. Ash was wrong, and believed in holy cleansing via guitar riff. And it's easy to go home and it’s easy to go outside and it's easy to go to uni and it's easy to hide your scars, in a circle
a prism
a bell

SEVEN CARD STUD

JUNE: Just showing you the ins and outs of this extremely cool game of skill.
ASH: Thank…you? JUNE: This game is seven card stud. I don’t know what that means. But I think I just won.
ASH: INCONCEIVABLE.
JUNE: I am... the joker...of poker.
ASH: You come to my house. On the day of my games night. And you claim to be the joker?!
JUNE: I never pretended to know what I was doing.
ASH: That makes you good at poker right?  JUNE: I’ve been practicing every day.
ASH: Sounds like a mental health crisis. JUNE: Do you want to play again?
ASH: Maybe when I’m not having a mental health crisis. My issues are now in charge of you. Sorry.
JUNE: I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah? 
(On his way out June thought she saw her friend LOU crossing the street. They made eye contact - he nearly tripped over the kerb - he tried to say hello but she turned the corner and he wondered if it had really been her. The grass as he crossed the park was wet. The moon was new - a void. —
JUNE: Ash had verbally eviscerated the thesis question fairly to Lou’s face without realising it was Lou’s thesis question. As Lou valued Ash’s opinion (she was an English and Theatre Studies honors student, was planning to direct a production of Hamlet and played three instruments) Lou took this very seriously.
LOU: They had met Ash through her going to June and Lou’s gigs.
JACK: She valued their opinion - since she’d upset Lou, none of them were very happy with her - so she was distraught. She hadn’t realised she could be dumped as a friend so quickly - that the bonds she’d felt, and hopeful direction her life had taken in honors (the previous 3 years she’d studied alone in cafes) could just vanish.
LOU: Her life took a turn and she suddenly couldn’t motivate herself to study. She deferred the next semester and fell into a deeply psychiatrically problematic gloom. Symptomatic reading, but you weren’t reading Marx.
JUNE: You were reading the news.
JACK: June had a journalist dad and had asked him to put a reference to the ‘occult hand’ which was a journalist injoke (“It was as if an occult hand had reached down from above and moved the players like pawns upon some giant chessboard.” Joseph Flanders, The Charlotte News) (which was subsequently made fun of and into a meme by many journalists.) and so there was an occult hand reference in the guardian australia which they’d all thought was funny. She’d told Ash specifically to look for it.
ASH: so ever since then I’d been looking for the messages in the news.
LOU: She started to print out articles and highlight (pink for subtext) the sentences where the messages were present.
ASH: I learned that {the frogs} loved me very much, which was really lovely except they wouldn’t stop sending the messages. I wanted to stop reading the news. But {the frogs} would be hurt if I stopped reading. It was a weird time. I was distraught and exhausted all the time. It stopped being just the news and started being all sorts of things. Bats. Blood. Mauve skies. The band. My friends. Frogs. And patterns in the foam in the detergent in the water in the bucket -

Belljars
JUNE brings in the bucket. He puts it down.
JUNE: Longing and unease permeate the album, titled Belljars, which is narratively themed on a ‘personal apocalypse’. Mundanity is punctured by ill omens, universal powers and forces that are greater than oneself, which threaten to undermine a somewhat restless reality. This sense of dread and instability may come from within or without one’s mind, but there’s no doubt that it is overturning one’s world, with a sense of regret a constant presence.
An apocalypse could be a revelation, a discovery, or the very end of the world; that could be one interpretation, but also it could be the apprehension in one’s personal life of a power greater than oneself.
It could some kind of lone, holy, magical and devastating singularity which has brought on this state of mind. The experience of a kind of madness - was a strong driver of this modality.
Writing the album was like -- grabbing for the moon’s reflection in a body of still water.
She reaches into the bucket and withdraws her hands as if stung. Blood.
Divine foolishness, I know.

Book of Acts
JUNE: It’s only another unreal history – set by a psychedelic RIVER. There were frogs by the RIVER And I drank black water from the RIVER The frogs made noise in our heads and I listened to them By the water drinking from the RIVER Listening and I heard so much music I thought I was the sun Reflected on the black WATER White eye-blue LIGHT It threw clear fire through my head Burnt me clean I thought I was the SUN I swallowed FROGS WHOLE
LOU: Walking through the flooded street I wondered where I was going and when I’d get there and who on my phone would answer my calls.
JUNE: Can I be just one thing? ASH: Can I find the places where I used to live, if I were to go on there for long enough?
LOU: Will I become well again, and again, if I could uncover what makes somebody good? And then quiet the shrieking when it starts – it’s an invasive species of bird. A quiet being by sunlight, taken away to become gone away from here in half-seen grey trees. Never seen after that, but never actually gone because the control couldn’t kill a strong thing.
ASH: I can’t tell you what I heard! And if I could find out JUNE’s secrets, who would I tell?
JUNE: I always felt like an observer.
LOU: And why was that?
JUNE: I had notebooks for the dreams. I would think about my friends, because I wanted to write a classical epic in sonata form. My friends didn’t fit into the plans or structures I’d composed- the dramatic structure of the narrative became diffuse, autotelic.
LOU: And how did that feel?
JUNE: I started to think that boundaries between art and life begin to break down at a certain point, as you start to grow, which is something you can’t witness in a crowded bar.
LOU: And who told you that?
JUNE: The act of becoming, changing or even acting is private made public. It’s not quite there, and I wouldn’t miss it for anything. Diffusion, transgression - words describing something that shouldn’t be happening, but you sort of know. I think. My friends always talked about me behind my back.
LOU: I thought there was a place in relating to people where I had a cause to reach out.
JUNE: What became certain to me as I wrote was a certain ontological and subjective singularity.
LOU: Could you be more specific?
ASH: No. Because as there’s things you know and don’t, there’s an idea of “truth”, I mean, what is going on amongst other feelings eg. “I think I’m insane but I know there’s something really wrong inside me that is real.” And I believe the truth and feelings aren’t facts and sometimes I believe in an alternative June, who visited the mother of christ’s mother in a dream.
JUNE: when he told me to sink under, O God, was Elijah taken up bodily. By my knees –Into Heaven as I am now.
JUNE: When my friends talk behind my back I listen and that’s how I became god -
LOU: But you’re wrong.
JUNE: Yes - god I did it; I’m sorry, I did it ASH, I’m sorry, it’s me, who says those things.
ASH: Mate, I never thought it was you and I know it isn’t you.
JUNE: Who was it then?
JUNE: I don’t believe what’s happening, I just think that I – I -
JUNE: God is in the house.
LOU: You’re in love with her, aren’t you?!
ASH: June’s my best friend.
ASH: And we’ve been talking all night.
LOU: Taken into Heaven as I am not.
JUNE: Jesus fucking christ I’m –
JACK: Jesus this album is confusing.
JUNE: Frogs and currawongs - Bubbling water- moonshine - lighters clicking - A banal place that we’ll go to when this is finally over - & Ash and I go home.
The moon
JUNE: We ended up by the Merri. I smoked and kept to myself. I don’t talk about hanging out by the creek much because it doesn’t feel right, like it’s a different world that I can’t access and I can’t explain. I guess they might feel like that.
ASH: That sounds cool.
JUNE: Yeah…it’s a different world.
ASH: Okay. I’d love to. Can I have more soup?
JUNE: Heck yeah.
ASH: Hmm. I need something solid actually.
JUNE: Sure.
ASH: Yeah. I know. Sorry. Something’s on my mind.
JUNE: Like what?
ASH: Like…about alternate versions of oneself.
JUNE: Like doppelgangers?
ASH: Like a ghost, a secret self.
JUNE: Sounds like things have been changing this whole time.
ASH: I guess we’re real.
JUNE: Yeah, it’s not just you. The rules have been buckling under your feet. It’s alive, ASH.
ASH: It’s real?
JUNE: Things changed. I didn’t even notice because I thought I could control myself. And I just went with the changes.
ASH: Like Hamlet in the bush. I saw him on stage. But it’s not a universal story.
JUNE: Those universal powers move us.
ASH: It happens all the time. I thought I made you up. The clouds are drawn spilling on my blouse, I have work to do. Smoke shudders green on glass. Time for time. Your smoke through my cells. Brain blanketing. Band finishing on time. Frog boy leaving. Getting to know him. Getting good. Frogs mean nothing, hearing a ticking, the clock’s blown. Jesus’ blank face split the world, because he sang its puncturing, the helium horned man knows, but not about coincidences, nor what I like. I love you
VOICE: Honey give me a smile  
ASH: The train line is a palimpsest.
I can’t walk, for
friendly doom
hurt goblin shaped clouds
stuttering above my favourite café.
There was a horrible talk,
after which
I went
for a walk.

VOICE: Immortal minute, fixed on this green cup,
Don’t let its moonlike waning shock us now.

ASH:
The world dissolved
in the morning
in Ballarat.

VOICE:
in your light room: A drawing
through the window as you are
to the beach walk
from your room
the way you move me in descant.

ASH:
I’ve seen you in the mirror, June - To let one know.
I crawled out
back to the garden
oh this moon’s for laughing.
two beings like me will exist, myself, and a jesus object - dialogue with a being woven of text with no insides

VOICE: soft train when they are fixing hair. “You have to put in time and practise” club lights + face illumination “when I finally get inside” the notes themselves

Psych
The rec room is dismal.

LOU: So the band’s going well. Um, how are you?

JUNE: My parents called the CAT team.

LOU: I’m so sorry.

JUNE: What’s your thesis topic again?

LOU: Mental health in youth communities.

JUNE: Right, you don’t have to like, assume the role of a psychiatrist with me…

LOU: I’m open to whatever you have to say. It’s open ended. It’s an anthropology thesis. My role is to listen.

JUNE: And synthesise with Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

LOU: Yeah pretty much!

JUNE: Are you still mates with my housemate ASH? Sorry, I’m not the anthropologist.

LOU: Yeah, actually. She’s kind of friends with JUNE. Kind of.

JUNE: Are you going to interview her for your research? I think she gets messages from music played by bands she likes.

LOU: Sure. Have you ever found yourself in one of those situations?

JUNE: Yeah, similar. And so…it does raise some issues…I don’t know how to put it. Relating to people.

LOU: Okay, I see. Like the reason you were admitted to the hospital?

JUNE: It’s tough being alone and it’s harder being around people, I don’t really know how to say these things aLOUd and they’re hard for people to deal with.

LOU: Well, I’m diagnosed with mental illness as well and I’ve been admitted to one of these places. That’s part of why I’m interested in this topic.

JUNE: Sure. It’s a lack of insight, I guess, which is what they call it when you can’t understand what you’re feeling isn’t real, but at the same time I’m being - possessed by some kind of alien or demon that controls everything around me. I mean… There’s no way to get across what I’m saying, you know?

LOU: Yeah right. People talk about schizophrenic experience collapsing all logic. Like suddenly you’re Donald Trump and people have trouble accessing the fact that you ARE Donald Trump but if you look at your subjective reality, it’s true. You are Donald Trump.

JUNE: It’s not like… Yes, I think that’s true. Because you say one of the conclusions you’ve come to out LOUd like, I am in hell and people are like well I’M not in hell so you’re not in hell. But it’s not just a subjective slippage of objective understanding. It’s like that for me, plus too much effort goes into understanding the world around you and your internal world. It’s about trying to understand things that are really happening around us and inside of us. Some patterns are just your mind, some patterns aren’t. Talking to people about it is like going to the newspapers after you’ve seen a ghost.

LOU: Wow, I see. Yeah, that’s sort of how I imagined it would feel, but at the same time it’s hard for me to understand exactly how it feels to be - from my perspective - deceived by your own brain.

JUNE: It could be like understanding someone else's religion.
Maybe you should talk to ASH…I don’t know…I feel like she has a broken objective understanding you’re probably thinking is the deal with having this mental illness. That’s the thing, I have that but I’m also dealing with demons. I mean it’s probably aliens. I just said demons because it’s kind of funny. I don’t know what it is. The presence of god.

LOU: Sounds deep to me… Actually it is kind of funny.

JUNE: It would be great if people recognised that it was kind of funny! But first they have to get to the point of believing these aliens are here!

LOU: So is it aliens or god?

JUNE: An alien? Who’s a god?

LOU: And why is he talking to you especially?

JUNE: Why don’t you ask him?

LOU: How does that work?

JUNE: Don’t worry. I’ll see you later.

LOU: Oh. Sure. I’ll see you around then.

Praxis
JUNE walks in with soup.
ASH: What’s up?
JUNE: Just thinking about - How are you?
ASH: Everything okay?
JUNE: Yeah.
ASH: Cool.
JUNE: Okay. None of what I said before was true.
ASH: Wild.
JUNE: You do not exist and aren’t really a real person with a real mind so it’s not possible for any of that to be true.
ASH: What’s a mind?
JUNE: A self. You don’t have a self. We made you up.
ASH: Who’s we?
JUNE: June and I. You’re a frankenstein’s monster of fragmented consciousness sewn together by our psychic malingering. We write your thoughts! We’re paid to come up with every single one of your conscious thoughts. I came up with your entire sense of humour. That’s why you like me so much, yet it’s so shitty.
ASH: It’s not shitty.
JUNE: Thanks. But it takes a lot of money and resources to run you. We have no time to live our own lives. I’ve wasted my youth on making you up and I’m really sick of you actually. So we’re pulling the plug.
ASH: That’s unethical.
JUNE: You will no longer be able to think. We control every aspect of your environment. We get actors to walk down the street and when they look you in the eye it’s been planned and we wrote your reaction beforehand. You’re operating from a limited perspective. You just don’t know what our technology is capable of! ‘You’ don’t exist. You’re watching your brain process a lot of complicated information, but your mind does not work on its own.
ASH: Do you…want to talk this over on a walk?
JUNE: You need to face the fact that it will be over soon. So get up and go for a walk. When you stop walking, you will die.
ASH: I don’t want to die. Oh my god. You made me say that? You wrote this entire conversation beforehand? Why would you write yourself as some kind of all-powerful god, that’s so tacky?
JUNE: I know! This is a really sad moment!
ASH: It is sad. I'm freaking out and this is making me sad.
JUNE: This is where it goes.
ASH: I didn’t go there on my own, I went because I was pushed, I stood on the train platform where once I’d seen an accident, I saw him on a train pulling out of the station, which couldn’t be real cos you’re not, the music swelled, his hair had all been shorn off, the train shot away and I could see the cops in the dark on the other side of the platform. Is it going to be okay?
JUNE: No.
ASH: What do you mean?
JUNE: The opposite.
ASH: Of what?
JUNE: It wouldn’t be real, so get out. Get up.
ASH: Like leave the house?
JUNE: The opposite of leave the house, the opposite of stay. And in the morning… I’ll go outside
ASH: And you’ll look at me like you’ve seen a ghost.
JUNE: As I should.
ASH: No.
I am a good person,
I have a simple heart.
You are so beautiful,
I am a good person,
You are so beautiful,
Thank you for everything.
You are so beautiful,
Where’s Lou? Is she real? I dreamed you said I wasn’t real? Is she real?
JUNE: Yeah.
ASH: And you’re real.
JUNE: Nope.
ASH: Well then really? Sucks to be you.

St. June
JUNE: I’m a Pisces, a metaphysical backwarding of energy is something that occurred to me, and should you find yourself in the same position, it would be wise to check yourself, as I did on the shore, as I did in the place Sylvia Plath goes, like a witch, towards life, after you go to sleep again uneasy dreams.
VOICE: And what are dreams for you? JUNE: A place. Or a well-intentioned plan. A representation of real joy.
VOICE: All my life spent not saying —I love - JUNE: No - I said that —
VOICE: Wait A Little Longer, And Carry That Weight Such Heights Last Night I Want My Music To Spin Like Plates Wick Skin Mouth Limbs Bite Name See Less Gut Gold Flesh Sweet Milk Just
JUNE: Is this real?
VOICE: Ghost Cities Angel Lion Explosion Eye Ribs City Cathedral Dermoid Cyst Witch-Eye Howl Of The Material Order/Chaos/Fear/Size Bloodlust-Eye Splintering Flesh Fire Control Bodies Mutation Anger Lava Cock-Eye'd
See Your Nosebeak And Erupt In Disgust Fear Angel Flesh Eye Ripped Cut Open The Wolf And The Dog Cut Open The Horse
Into The Morning-Eye Cut Open The Fish Cut Open The Deer Cut Open The Fox Cut Open The Man No Don't Do That Moses There'll Be A River Of Blood Moses And A Plague Of Frogs And An Angel Of Death And
Night During The Day And A Parting Of The Waters Like God's Knife Dividing The Skin Of The Red Sea And The Parting Of The Reeds By Your Crib The Reeds You’re Buried In
JUNE: I’m – in – control. echo of an echo of a scene of a hundred climaxes an echo of a memory of a word from a memory - words from memories structure and strings and repetition-
VOICE: And what do you mean by that?
JUNE: I need to stop being so concerned over what's true and what's a lie, what’s a dream and what's real. To be honest, they're all the same thing. I'm deliberately misled at every turn. Reality's a dream and vice versa. What's the point of being frightened of lies? The truth is also lies. They will hurt me and leave me. And come back.
VOICE: And what else?
JUNE: What's fucked up is how awkward this whole mind-reading thing is.
VOICE: It’s totally fine, trust me. JUNE: I’m putting on some music. VOICE: Put some flowers in a bowl.
JUNE: Something nice.
VOICE: Something real.

The Feedback

ASH: (on the phone to Jack) JUNE hasn’t shown up for three days. I can't look at pictures of her. Her instagram’s gone, and her number's blocked. I don’t know if she's safe. Her parents think he’s away too. They don’t seem worried. It’s like I’m supposed to just go along with it.
I feel a bit reflective. All shiny and cold, like a piece of glass, an underwater moon.

Enter JUNE

ASH: Are you real?

JUNE: Yeah.

ASH: Is everything normal?

JUNE: No.

ASH: Do you know the truth?

JUNE: No.

ASH: Will you come back?

JUNE: I don’t know. (She rolls a cigarette)

ASH: I’m sorry.

(She receives a text)

Sorry about today. hope ur ok. see you soon xxx
JUNE

ASH: That was very kind of her to say.

(JUNE hands her a dart. She takes it. They smoke in silence.)

Jesus was a Capricorn
JUNE: We are looking at turning the stage into a chthonic labyrinth, the set will take place in this labyrinth. I think it’ll open up a lot of room for interpretation.
So when the lyrics have Lou singing things like “It’s only a paper moon,” I’d like the walls to start buckling and cables, backline etcetera to start appearing and disappearing. With lights, we were thinking initially the stage was going to alternate between dimly lit, with colour, and very stark cool-toned light - and there’s these competing visions of reality ...but then I was thinking we would just have the whole thing performed in pitch black.
You might start to reach out to everything and everyone around you – friends, enemies, animals, ghosts, the art on the walls – everything that might be a separate consciousness to yourself could feel alive and friendly, strange but kind.
She slowly makes as if to reach into the bucket – then decides against it.
On second thoughts. Strike all that.
The music illustrates a certain inner turmoil. I think that for the audience, it could be about the tram rattling past the Melbourne General Cemetery, a good place to watch the moon if you’re worried it might leave the sky painted black like an empty stage; and the pulsing in your feet - 30 degrees of which means the end of all things, or at least that a Cycle Of The Universe Is Finished; falling in love; pages turning; cards shuffling; a real voice like a bird calling under the second sun.
Wilfrida V
JUNE: Sit down.
Ash’s gaze is fixed on June. She does not look at the bucket.
ASH: Your voice is familiar. It’s a voice like an angel.
JUNE: What’s in the bucket? ASH: Don’t care.
JUNE: You’re in a silver catastrophe. ASH: Arcane creature; stop. JUNE: I might be young in time. It is your holy grail.
ASH: It is not for sale. JUNE: You care what’s in the bucket. ASH: You can’t make me look. JUNE: What’s chasing you? ASH: My emotions. JUNE: They’re inside. ASH: I won’t look. JUNE: Feel your feelings. ASH: When does this end? JUNE: When you look inside. ASH: I’m not going to. JUNE: Look now. ASH: (picks up the bucket and looks in it) JUNE: describe what’s in it. ? ASH: Describe...it? JUNE: Explain it. Some things, like getting better, are done alone. But don’t.
ASH: You don’t run my life. JUNE: Don’t kick the bucket, Ash. ASH kicks bucket and makes to leave. JUNE: And please, don’t be sorry. I’m here to help.. You’re very precious to me. Keep going, There’ll be highs and lows.

Hamlet
Jack and JUNE playing chess.
LOU: What’s your plan. Hm.
JUNE: I don’t know yet. Things are weird. The songs are weird. They’re hyperbolic almost. I’m worried about how people will react.
LOU: I was talking about the game - JUNE: I mean like...I can’t tell you my plan for the game.
LOU: What are your plans? What’s your direction in life?
JUNE: Don’t know. But it’s going to involve writing.
LOU: So the premise of the songs is that a person goes mad. JUNE: Yes, someone does. It’s subterranean and ontologically wrong.
LOU: Yeah OK haha.
JUNE: Come on you know what I mean. It’s a mystery to everyone. It’s not planned. It’s mystical in a way. It’s a narrative about the barriers between oneself and other diffusing, unbecoming.
LOU: The process of ...unbecoming. And you’re avoiding...a Hamlet, play-within-a-play situation? Reaching people in a sense.
JUNE: There’s paradoxes listed on Wikipedia you find yourself reading aLOUd. Like, the story of Scheherazade is only a story. But there’s stories within it. What if there were stories within that.
LOU: Real talk. JUNE: Well it’s just music.
LOU: Check!
JUNE: Shouldn’t be possible to find a move this good.
LOU: You can come back from this.
JUNE: Sure. LOU: What’s the music...about?
JUNE: Well, yeah...me. In a way.
LOU: Have you ever written a love song for me?
JUNE: No. LOU: Who is? JUNE: You ask good questions. LOU: Questions within questions. Check.
JUNE: And no answers. LOU: The answers are within. JUNE: They’re what you want them to be. LOU: Describe the answers to me. Their shape, their color, their weight.
JUNE: Blue and round like a small planet, and sounding like a bell.
LOU: Checkmate. JUNE: ...This game is really fucking confusing.
a shitty story Ash wrote for her Creative Writing unit
After the show they went to sit in the beer garden. Jake fidgeted with a hole in the knee of jeans. Jeanne felt restless, felt she couldn’t concentrate on anything but the problem of the song, how it could possibly be about her.
“Yeah, they were pretty good,” Jake said.
“I- yeah,” said Jeanne. “I sort of – “ She frowned. “Um, you know how I texted you about them the other week?”
Now that she was about to say it, it sounded ridicuLOUs, almost psychotic. She decided to pLOUgh ahead anyway.
“Yeah,” said Jake.
“I just feel like – you know – one of their songs – I really relate to it. I almost feel like they wrote it from my perspective, you know?”
“Really?” Jake looked at her with worry. “Some of those songs were pretty dark.”
“Yeah, I...” Suddenly she couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t clarify further. The attempt to put her experience into words made it all seem incredibly strange. “I guess. I haven’t been feeling that great lately, I guess.”
“Yeah, me neither.” He paused, like he was about to say something. “Come on, spit it out,” she said.
“It’s falling out with JUNE,” he said. “I feel really down about it. I’m sorry for what I said to you, I was just...I don’t know.”
“Hey, that’s fine,” she said, surprised. “That’s what’s getting me down as well, I think. It’s just, we used to hang out all the time and now...”
“Now it’s a bit fucked. Yeah. I’m not surprised you’re feeling down and listening to dark music or whatever.”
“I almost felt,” she tried to say again, then stopped. The song suddenly seemed hugely irrelevant. It was just a song.
They parted with a hug. Jeanne walked back to the tram along a path lined with graffiti-covered buildings. She trailed her fingers along the paint. Maybe things could be fixed. She could fix things. She thought about Jake’s warm, dependable presence. They could all fix things maybe. It could be okay. She didn’t feel like she needed to worry about the music right then. It was going to be okay.
That was all she wanted, really, to feel like she wasn’t drowning and completely, it’s knifelike like this, alone, in a dark place, like a cave - with two other people standing in it - no -
three-
four
-five
-six hundred -
7 hundred and twenty three birds.

The only thing stopping me from thinking about the past, in a sense
Ash sits crosslegged watching the bucket.
Music, then Stillness. The bucket tips over.
ASH: Things make sense. I promise. Things make sense when you put the pieces together in a circle, a triangle, or a square; you want several types of angles; and you want coherency. You need things to keep going. The same way. Largely, every day. The principle of angles. All working together. To make. A triangle. The strongest. shape. But there’s a conflict. triangles are not perfect. I didn’t have enough coherency. I wasn’t promising enough. I read about the frogs. I read about the frogs and I nearly left the picture. There was a weird light in the sky. There was a weird quality to June. There was something about Lou. And they never really learned why I’d thought that. I’d gone there alone.
And what happened next? And then?
Rosalind Krauss calls modernist artworks based on the concept of the ‘grid’ pattern ‘cheerfully schizophrenic’ because they imply infinite extension of this grid pattern. A grid collapses logic.
Did she dream or write that she were only dreaming?

Standing on the train platform in the suburbs, I listened to the song getting out of control, and it meant it was really intense, finding the sublime place beyond.

I left the train platform in the suburbs and went north by car.
I collected vinyl. The needle went inwards. You can live life like a dream, you can get out of it too, mundane places carry dream inscriptions. When it skips at the start of the second song it’s always surprising. I want to communicate a singularity of how it feels – if only if I could construct a grand dream journey out of needles.

If God constructs a gorgeous dream, if we believe the dream is real, in the dream are you taking it too literally, are you taking it too personally, are you overreacting, are you misinterpreting? And - at what COST?

It knew what I was feeling, it offered words to the false idea I couldn’t speak what I was feeling. There’s a lot of transcendent imagery. So many people have gone through this too.
The words embedded themselves in my brain and I think - I decided that I needed reassurance and that laughter existed so much, that I could always reach some sublime understanding with people, but I was in a fake wrong place, and the universe threw it back.

I had twisted the self I thought I was (into a form of schizophrenia?) where I thought I was someone else, and then I had to see myself as I’d become. Everyone else started to become someone else so it was the construction of a dream world that became real. The experiment began…and the sensual world comforts during this time…! But it’s only a simulacrum! The world became a place of empty ghosts and reflections! Because everyone knew and no one would tell me!
if you could never speak about it - But I thought I had to say it - reach out -

Joy is like a dream if the music only happens inside your head and bad and good things only happening there are bad for your outlook.
places we haunt become mediocre over time.
It’s cathartic and ghostlike to me.
It’s like reinscribing a wound.
Scrawled somewhere nameless.
I must be full of joy when I listen - I listen all the time.
Someone gave me the music.
I took it. Who brought me here to this singular place, because I thought you felt something like – It’s just music.

The music

The monologue may be recorded and played back, a movement piece could work here.

LOU: When I reinscribe the band into my day, with each verse of each song, I go back to the place that a piece of music is.

It was meant to represent the BEACH in your SOUL which is connected to a RIVER THROUGH MOUNTAINS playing in the WATERS of CREATION.

I had heard a piece of music that was explicitly about this kind of experience if one accepts that a magical experience can occur not just in reality but in the place of a piece of music. If you accept that the song describes you, your housemate, your mental illness, your teleological narrative, where did the song come from? It must have come from the mind of a human being.

Or a synthesiser making an album out of infinite planes, a computerised schizophrenia.
You can reinscribe those moments, cauterise the pain, if you listen to it. If you journey into the spirit world do you journey out by playing a song on repeat in a hospital or living room – beyond a dream’s infinite edges?

You can live life like a dream, and mundane sounds carry dream inscriptions.

It’s out there for a lot of us. I reached it one day but there’s a certain amount of solipsism involved sometimes.
Then you’re in a good place sometimes.
It’s like this haunted place is fulfilling in some way. The landscape of a time, healing the split that had occurred of the painted face in the mirror that I saw was ASH, a face drunk on spring and in doing so I comprehend the Other, the bells ring through the bandroom, ticking boxes inside our heads.

I walked through the places she came to haunt and found I lost them and the songs too.
Like giving the music away. I thought you felt something like, it’s just music. Birds talk with frogs, and I play guitar. It’s raining on the other side of the universe, where Ash lives and is real.