ACT FOUR: Magnetic Island!
[A diagram. An engraving. One side of the stage is lit with a hazy sunny humid light. One side of the stage has an interrogation lighting, perhaps some realist chairs and tables. Sun on one side, moon on the other. The division is a bit Platonic, a bit Exupéry, a bit Elizabethan masque. Stage makeup is thick on Assange and crew. They have been translated into beings of Art. At the center, with a foot in either orbit, stands MUSE. EXUPÉRY, in a cape of trash but wearing his swart kepi and stage makeup, including a pencil moustache, sits at the Interrogation desk. ASSANGE and YOUTH are arranged in loving but troubled tableau in the sunshine. For example: Four Saints in Three Acts]
MUSE: Now, thanks to a late issue
of slick, malignant cells from unknown sources,
we have slid across the very ocean.
We have arrived at Magnetic Island.
An allegorical masque. A dome of pure thinking.
As you will note, I hold the center of the stage.
I drink the light through my skin like black narcissus.
Dahlia Noir,
my stage name. Mama Julian here is La Dame Aux
Camilles.
AKA Camille Le Blanc as in J’ai pas sommeil. We
shared that role
as juvenile performers.
“O mon sommelier, I cannot sleep with this CUT
THROAT!”
How we tripped the boards in our peekaboo trousers
on our pieds noir….
But now we’ve run through our youthful qualities.
It’s time for my soliloquy.
[Clears throat]
According to Mother, I was just a teen like any teen
when I left Gyalko, just two weeks back
with nothing but the nylon jacket on my back.
Did I have time to become noble? To learn a role?
No. I have just as much sex drive, idealism, hunger and
violence as any other teenager of God.
Statistically average in terms of chemical composition.
I come from a part of the world where the maps
tore through
from too much loving rubbing with the eraser.
So edible, so pink…and with a pinky fume…
Something there is that doesn’t love a map, like war
butter and treasure. Europe held us to its bosom like
a drunk mother
till it didn’t. Then it became a drunk uncle,
poking us under the tarp.
But no matter. But more matter, more Art.
The mighty Ulster warrior Cuchullain
tied himself with his own innards to a standing stone
that his enemies might not realize he was dead
nor his friends either and end the war too soon.
And so I beat on. Language is my cinch and noose.
I should have died in the womb.
of malnutrition or machete by the age of three
But my mother tended me
But my mother died for me by refusing to die.
By coding me with the
REFUSAL TO DIE. So I refuse to be your tragic youth,
what your machine needs to blow off steam
in a whistle or a shriek.
The file it deletes as it performs its system
maintenance
its statistical depredations. NO.
Apparently I wrote a note
inside that boat, in the blood that flew
from my own tender throat. And I blamed it all
on foreign wars.
No, that wasn’t me. Apparently I was a little handsy
when we hooked up in my dorm room No.
I did not attend UMass Dartmouth
failing every subject but creative writing. No.
But I did kill my mother who bought me the guns
to make the peace between us
before I left for the school. I columbined.
Sic semper tyrannis.
I did meet my murderers in a bar. I knew them from
high school.
Nope. I was a Red Guard, bayonetting books
until the day I thought to open one,
then took the poison whole
in sick bay til I could not longer hold the bayonette.
NO. DON’T BARK.
SPEAK THE LANGUAGE OF THE SPANISH
EMPIRE!
wasn’t me. Act gratuit
wasn’t me. Run the gamut
wasn’t me. Instagram’d the gang rape
nope. Tied a cash register to Emmett Till’s chest
with barb wire and riverrunned him
no. Destroyed the village to save it
no. 3/5ths compromise wasn’t me.
9/11 wasn’t me. Operation Enduring Freedom
wasn’t me. Allah, allah, allah, allah.
Regime change wasn’t me.
Credit default swaps wasn’t me.
I was 16. I didn’t have a chance to come into my
full criminalitee.
Upon a peak at Darien
Upon a peak at Darien
Upon a peak at Darien
Darien Darien
Smallpox blanket
Colonie collapse or
colonie
wasn’t me
Motives are bunk.
Motives are for movies
Motives serve the plot.
But I serve nothing
except Allah. And only there
as befits an ambivalent teen.
Motives are a term of tee vee law
part of a holy trinittee.
Means, motives, or opportunity.
When did I ever have means
when did I ever have opportunities
and since I respectfully refuse to take up your ‘motives’
except panic, hormones, and a light desire to eat—
that makes me a zero a cipher
a zed a nothing in your programming
a hitch a zilch a full stop
that makes the code stutter
that dithyrambs the logarithm
and calls off the search.
The search engine stalls out like the SS Smirk.
If I must have a mask
let it be zero. Otherwize
I won’t participate in tragedee.
Motives are to me
what grappling hooks are to
deep sea divers. Throw me an anvil
and teach me to fish forever.
I’ll lie under the sea, fishing, fishing,
and lying, lying. [strapping on his ‘zero’ mask]
Now I’m invisible
now I’m a green screen
the weather crawls
on top of me
And these are the pearls
that were my eyes…
[Climbs up on a box like Abu Ghraib, statue of liberty, Mother Erzulie, etc…. Company may decide its associations]
DEAD YOUTH 1: What is it Christmas already? Is Muse the
Christmas tree?
DEAD YOUTH 2: Or a cell phone tower? Or Ariel in the Tree?
DEAD YOUTH 1: Turn him like a weathervane. See if our reception improves.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Enough. I don’t like all this poking at dear Muse.
I don’t like all this prodding. For all we know, he’s the
magic ingredient
that allowed our capsule to break down in the gut of
plot so perfectly.
To arrive at Magnetic Island.
DEAD YOUTH 1: O this island. It’s a pit.
DEAD YOUTH 2: It’s a dump.
DEAD YOUTH 1: It’s a mass grave!
DEAD YOUTH 2: Without the masses. It’s deserted.
ASSANGE: Not at all. It’s just the off-season. You boys play the part of the unseasonable youth. Untimely plucked. Watch out or you’ll be juiced. [his tail switches like a lazy cat]
EXUPÉRY: [from office area] ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE
MUSE: I recognize the representative of France.
EXUPÉRY: You are not the judge!
Nor president pro temp!
You do not recognize me.
I myself am JUSTICE.
I recognize you.
YOUTH TO YOUTH: HUM, blind justice recognizes muse!
YOUTH TO YOUTH: That’s what, in science, we call a double-blind.
TOUT YOUTH: A very pharmaceutical pursuit! Forsooth.
EXUPÉRY: Silence, youth! It is golden.
It has a mouth, but it’s fixed.
Like a clock, or a neutered cat,
or suit brought against an emperor.
In other words, can it.
YOUTH: Silence in other words! That is strange science!
EXUPÉRY: Let the interrogation proceed. Now, Muse, I don’t want to have to take out my carburetor or my salad tongs. So answer my questions. Sing, muse.
MUSE: I wont.
EXUPÉRY: Then prattle.
MUSE. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
YOUTH: The only emperor is the emperor de glace
MUSE the only emperor is the one who stands naked
YOUTH: the only emperor is the emperor sans pants
MUSE And communicates to youth, directly in his nakedness
ASSANGE: O dream of a crystalline communication.
Flap flap to dirty ears. The pidgins of pigeons.
The germs they smuggle in their penates and pinions.
The germs they share for a puddle of crumb-ions.
Good pigeons, grey matter, rats with aspirations!
O rank mass, its rank communicants! Its holy
communications!
YOUTH: We Catholics believe in transubstantiation.
Our uncanny valley runs on circuits of revulsion.
MUSE: How like a thing, how like a paragon
YOUTH: how like a think, how like an epicure
MOUSE: how like a stink, how like a pedicure
YOUTH: how like bacteria that thrives in the footbath
MUSE: how like a strand of flesh-eating staph
YOUTH: how like the society ladies hobble on no feet
MUSE: until they realize it makes their jimmy choos fit better to have no feet
YOUTH: how they then occupy the lotus position
MUSE: how like a bath salt
YOUTH: how like a bidet
MUSE: What a piece of… work is man
YOUTH: this line should be ‘le seul empereur est l’empereur de la crème glacée’
MUSE: Caveat emptor
YOUTH: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrat
MUSE: Follow your leader. That’s called dictee.
EXUPÉRY: I see you are a very learned man.
MUSE: Maleducated. Malaparte. That’s why we formed our bande à part. Before the Little Emperor could pursue his destiny, he flipped the ‘Malaparte’ to ‘Bonaparte.’ A visionary must also have a literalist’s heart. And wear it like a medal on his chest.
EXUPÉRY: O what a fine speech! O medals all around!
YOUTH: [affixing metals by driving pins into Muse’s torso. He now resembles a Sebastian] That’s tantalum, that’s for capacity, in hearing aids, jet blades, and telephony. There’s cassiterite that’s for circuitboards. And there’s wolframite that’s for ‘green ammunition’, i.e. bullets with less lead. So children who eat bullets won’t get lead poisoning and perform poorly in standardized tests. Also good for making your iPhone vibrate.
ALL: What?
YOUTH: I kid you not. Wolframite is a very right metal. People mine each other for it. I’m talking about a combat mine, mined by gangpresed soldiers. I am not even talking about a data mine.
ASSANGE: OH MUSE you are a bouquet. You are a very directory, a very index, the very body of contemporary miseree.
EXUPÉRY: That’s enough. Don’t encourage his vanitee. Second question. MUSE, when brought to trial in New York, why did you smile for the cameras.
MUSE: Because I have a face.
[rimshot]
[rifle crack]
EXUPÉRY: WHAT’S THAT?
MUSE: Because I have a face.
EXUPÉRY: OBSCENE ANSWER!
MUSE: It is the opposite of obscene. The obscene must be hidden from view. My face I show. It is a black face, but it is not in blackface. It comes from a black site. It is a leak.
EXUPÉRY: Oh Obscene. O how his teeth gleams, his smile, and his eyes, his charisma, and his native talent for being alive. O obscenity. What a felony! Youth tar him with petroleum products. Then he will know what it means to be in capitalism’s embrace. IN THE BOSOM OF THE LAW.
YOUTH: [tar Exupéry instead]
EXUPÉRY: WHAT? What is the meaning of this?
YOUTH: Are you not the font of Justice? I recognize you, I met you so many time on the other side of the bench. You sent me to juvie for a decade, took the kickback to buy golf clubs. Luckily I OD’d and was thus released from my sentence, albeit to the morgue. Now you wear black robes you wore in life, which shows you have been invested with gravure, as in the grave.
EXUPÉRY: Well I see. Grandeur is grand. That’s tautologee, a very right and total logic. Let us proceed with the proceedings. Where were we?
MUSE: You asked me why I smiled, and I replied, because I have a face.
EXUPÉRY: Yes, yes. And yet the next day, at your trial, you wept and wept. Why did you weep?
MUSE: Because I am a teen. Because I had just learned the role cut out for me. The role of tragic youth. I didn’t want it, but could not avoid it. I was trapped. And I wept because I had tears at my disposal. And I disposed of them. Or perhaps I had a grit in my eye. Perhaps I thought I could weep out an industrial diamond so tough I could use it as a weapon and cut up the court.
EXUPÉRY: O, a threat! A threat against the body of the court. Oh what a mongrel! And yet we cannot lose our composure. As a final piece of evidence, I would like to read out something you wrote on your blog. “I think I should select from my poems as my favorite the Emperor of Ice Cream. This wears a deliberately commonplace costume, and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it.”
MUSE: I wrote that?
EXUPÉRY: Yes, rat and you are trapt. You are trapt forever in your own snare because you wrote this on the Internet. It’s data. It’s datestamped.
MUSE: When did I write that?
EXUPÉRY: You wrote in 1933 in Hartford Connecticut.
MUSE: Well then I denounce it. That was in my youth. Before I came into my revolutionary consciousness. Emperors indeed. Though the essential gaudiness of poetry is quite a phrase, something to hold on to, to pin to the breast…
EXUPÉRY: Your opinion about emperors has no bearing on this case. My god, you blacks. Whine whine. Somalia hasn’t been ruled by an emperor for at least…well, decades. As for ice cream, typically childish. I can’t understand this substance’s resurgence in this play as a motif. I thought this was a play about petroleum.
DEAD YOUTH: Judge, if it please the court, I’d like to file a brief. Ice cream and petroleum are polar opposites of each other, and thus may substitute for each other, bind, and form a digital system. We pow’r this colony with the swerve, with the flip-flip. Then we can parade about in Speedos and flip-flops, and have ice-cream in the freezer and run the vaccuum cleen all night. As for me, like a true hustler, I like both oil AND ice cream. I’m ecumenical. Look, I’ve black nylons under my track bottoms. My jacket’s so synthetic it could melt.
EXUPÉRY: Silence, dead pageboys. You call that trash philosophie the ‘idealism of youth’? With that kind of idealism you’re more suited for a Weimar cabaretto than the Furor’s youth. Now, like the Furor, let’s be rational and logical. Let’s review the facts of the case. Your excuse for your great crime of piracy is your youth. An excuse immediately invalidated by the fact that you are being tried as an adult. Therefore, ipso facto, you are no youth, therefore you are defenseless. You sir, are no youth! QED. GED. JD. STD. Associates Degree from the Lice Lycee. Also, since you refuse to ascribe to yourself a motive, I must assign one to you, and I shall select one that is more than mere larceny, which would be par de course. No, sir, let me see….your motive is villainy, villainy itself, tout court and tout suite, and your wish to see villainy communicated to the innocent flank of the world, in the person of the MV Maersk which you so wantonly call ‘the Smirk.’ O piracy! O cult of villainy! O cur! O scourge! O sturgeon with black eggs! O rub his face in shoe polish, shoe ‘blacking’ burnt corn cobs and ash! I should sentence you to DEATH. O, but being Just I love MERCY. So instead I shall transport you to Terre Haute Indiana for thirty-three-and-one-third years. Don’t snuffle you’ll emerge an exhausted 51. Though I dare say you’ll have lost your looks.
YOUTH: No, MUSE, we will not let you perish! You or your good looks! You are a role model to us!
MUSE: DEAD YOUTH, I am not a role model. I’m not even an athlete. My only mission is not to die before my time. I wanted to say my piece, and my piece is over. And yet, I feel a tear forming right here. In these two organs which are to sight what hearing is to ears. I mean my eyes. They’re pearlescing. They’re dropping white bacterial wads in front of me. O I lose my vision. I am become a twin of justice. I am a white world. I am blind.
YOUTH: No! There is one more hope! A deus ex machina! A pederastic stroke of plot’s ass by the divine.
[they gather around Muse like women at the tomb of christ]
ASSANGE: I believe it is time to reveal myself.
No, I do not claim to be the son of the Divine
I think I’m a little smarter than him
I’m not going to do the eli eli lama sabachthani
just because some moron spills the salt
or tears up when the cock cries out
in some damp suburban hideout.
If there’s one error you can count on,
it’s human kind. I have been betrayed so many times!
But I am the son of Christine Assange,
who survived. In the Anthropocene,
and at the mercy of men and their
financial instruments, that is no small thing.
People, a conspiracy is an engine.
It is also a computer.
A thinking machine.
It can think better than any single component entity.
this conspiracy. Another name is Wikileaks.
I built Wikileaks to be the CIA of the people of earth
so that they could know the workings of their own states
in perfect Transparencee. The veil is rent! Or at
least soilent.
For this I have been reviled as some kind of reptile
the Original Wriggler, the one with no conscience.
Who only loves his own blonde hair and fame.
I mean the odd snake who’s gay and rapes women
you meet so frequently in films and not on earth.
Still, I won’t entirely refute the charges
because I love films. Though I’m organic.
I come from a blonde.
Sometimes I think I’m a little John Lennon
with my idealism, and my disappearing acts,
and my feminine good looks, and my conspiracee.
He wore those granny glasses to bring the truth
to light.
But really, the truth was as plain as blacklight.
the truth was a black eye.
the truth was a bottle, blonder.
A blonde of gold and tungsten
A wiry blonde, a blonde of wiring
A nylon blonde, a blonde of laddering
A punched-out blonde, a blonde of hiding
A blonde of smuggling and a blonde of trafficking
I change my hair when I’m being followed
I’ve learned that from the movies
A blonde of dubiety and a blonde of beauty
two blonde suns would make the sky fall down
pull the universe apart with too much gravity
Everything’s God’s fault
because god is not a mother.
O Christ I’m an atheist I only believe in bad motives
and mothers
And in computers. Tho mothers can have bad motives
and bad mothers can have good motives and computers
can have no motives.
Something can be itself or its opposite.
Zero can be one. The value is not significant
but the difference is. When there is no difference,
that’s where the digital collapses and gives birth to
the virtual.
That’s where the virtual betrays the digital
and is a bad son.
I’m still toting this box
its full of bees but they might be dead
I don’t know, it’s Schrodinger’s symbol
it’s Turing’s cervix
inside the box
actions are performed not as on a theater stage
where all the world is, merely players
and etcetera
no as in a black box
lost at cee when the plane went down
the chatlogs of catastrophe
a blacksite, a torture space
most profound
you have to share your cell with a dead cat
who might yet be alive
twitch twitch
bird brain
the virtual lives in the box
the virtual pours from the box
it’s not that we don’t know the facts
but that there might be no facts
quote unquote
the only place I feel safe is the Internet
quote unquote
I call that faith
which looks like fame
the drug the universe loves
I mean the Internet
eats and shits, makes more of
smears on everyone’s face
I call myself St. Julian Assange
I am such a massive blonde
I should have my own SS
and I do: the SS Smirk…
and from the outside it looks like the universe
closed in on itself
brooding
but inside
but inside
but inside
but inside
but inside
but inside
but inside
it is a massive ride
it propagates massive fields
you can’t ride there with your citizen self
you can’t ride there with your Cartesian self
it cops a massive feel
so tiny and so mass mass doesn’t mean mass anymore
a mass defection, a genuflection, a granule smaller than
a flea’s ass could crash
the gala ball
the galaxy’s confection
Henrietta Lacks
conspiracy is an engine
conspiracy is a machine
it thinks better than the individual human
but like anything built by humans
its faults are human faults
it is vulnerable to betrayal and confession
bad fits of conscience
given the bad behavior of the creator I believe
if there is a Divine man made it
it is a human product
and will have human problems
unless we can work around it
by not being humans
by being Divine, not alive
I have been a shit on earth
I will be in heaven, and on the Internet,
and in this box,
a beautiful thing
streaked in gold
I will move in the heavens like bad news
my own omenology
an encrypted key
a monstrance
a lock box
made available for public veneration
visible yet invisible
venereal like a golden chancre
God pins to the very cervix of his sanctissima
it will hold and expose all the leaks in the sea
and free all the capped-boys from their tethers
and buoys from their links
but for now [takes out large scissors and begins to shear his
hair to the scalp]
we hide
in plain sight.
we form an engine
called conspiracy
[he dons a prison guard outfit, and so do the DEAD YOUTH]
and with this engine
we reanimate the dead carcass of this cul-de-sac
and steer it to our next paradox
[they fit an orange jump suit over muse, and lift him to the
ground]
the federal correctional complex
most suited to a pirate
for his crimes against the see
is a very inward empire
with no externalitee
with no coastline
but the locks and high walls
of a paradox: a very landlocked port.
There he will be housed in the
Communications Management Unit
ie an incommunicado sound set
that looks like prison life
but is just for Muslims
and has no telephone, mail, visits or ISP
there he will turn his face from obscenity to obscurity
never to sully with his visage
what is so prized in Terre Haute:
Malls, landlines and shooting ranges.
And when he has become an ultradense
packet of information
we will release him back into the system
to explode it with his dark energy.
Gentlemen, to Terre Haute.
[they march Muse off as a police escorte]
[the interrogation light becomes superbright on the immobilized Exupéry and suddenly blacksout]