HEMINGWAY SEIZED THE DOILY (notes about Chloe)

161. HEMINGWAY SEIZED THE DOILY (notes about Chloe):

We were sitting around the theater’s lounge drinking black coffee from enormous white mugs (as actors often do) and Mike Bartholomew the flue man stood up and started to address the room “I know Chloe and I know her well enough to know that she’d never put this material in this manner down on paper - I think she’s meant all of this as merely an open-ended ‘idea’ for us to operate out of or to depart from as starting point and the entire point anyway of this production is the quality it has of ad lib or improvisation BY the actor FOR other actors and no so much for the stupid audience - which will show up no matter what we end up doing or saying for it’s JUST that kind of crowd and that sort of production” and although he was quite certain of what he said (you could hear it in his voice and tell it from his mannerisms) no one still was yet converted to his way of thinking - all wanting direction and rules - BUT if theater is something to be hatched then what really does it matter who wrote what and who says whatever in whichever manner - after all it’s all but actors and writers playing with words - and how can you set up a believable scenario of anything if no one (really) knows what it is they’re trying to do ? so so much for all of that and I thought of Chloe herself right then (she was dead almost a year – having committed a wonderful oven-suicide a la Sylvia Plath but forgetting first the fame (or mixing it up perhaps with ‘flame’) – who knew?) and like Chloe herself I remembered someone telling me of my own work how it overlaps and mixes up time and people are ‘there’ and ‘not really there’ at the same time and how it’s sometimes difficult to differentiate between what really happened in my work from what one just ‘thinks’ happened and all that together is the mystery of it and its unfathomable appeal is in its everyday plain and easy use of conversational language and manner mixed and underscored by the weird time-travel and dispersion of words ideas and occurrences and people all within it and the reader (or listener) is left wondering ‘is this factual or is it fanciful and what’s going on here anyway?’ but I never followed up on any of that for further discussion even though we were both supposed to write to each other broadly detailed notes about what went on in each piece – yet as I found out with Chloe LIFE IS A LOT SLOWER THAN DEATH (or is that death comes a lot swifter than life?) but no one meant to differentiate and nothing mattered by three o’clock and then on the nearby TV we were all just haphazardly watching something going on on the screen behind Mike Bartholomew’s back when I realized it was Lee Harvey Oswald himself being led out through the basement of some police-jail station when suddenly on the black and white picture of oh so long ago out pops some arm or something of some Jack Ruby nightclub owner whoremaster strip club pimp and he shoots this Lee Harvey Oswald a few times in the gut and the whole scene breaks down and Oswald crumbles and later dies anyway and that quickly it was just ALL over - as we wondered aloud if we had Chloe to thank for all of that too for really really really that was the end of all old time forevermore!