No Tidy Ending In Sight

March 2016.   I dream my vehicle drops through a crevice and I fall into what seems like a hotel lounge.  The walls don’t quite reach the floor, ending about a foot too soon.  Water pools in that space.    In fact, water pools everywhere.   I open the door to what appears to be a theatre. Red.   Also flooded.   I wade through the water but retreat as I sense the presence of ghosts, returning to the lounge to find a fundraiser in full swing.  Apparently I have organized it.

The theatre in my dream has a proscenium stage.  I had not realized there are so many types:  thrust, end, arena, flexible, profile.  And then there are the various types of theatre:  tragedy, comedy, improv and musical.  I suspect what is represented in this collage is improv.

My entire theatre, if not all the world, seems to be a stage.  Every available space is given over to drama of some sort.  Even the seating area is co-opted for those purposes, the pseudo ghosts, a few actors from ‘The Great Race,’ launching a pie fight for their own entertainment.    Apparently 4000 pies were thrown in the actual scene.  Less here.

I intend to glue the truck on top of the wave but just as I am pressing down I notice another wave and have a moment of indecision as to which wave I want.  I choose the wrong one.  Suddenly I feel the placement of the truck to be the most important thing in the world.

My father dies.  He has breakfast that morning, says a few words, is lifted onto the commode and dies.  One moment breathing, the next not.  Eleven twenty-one alive, eleven twenty-two, not.  I continue to flip back and forth…alive dead alive dead.

The idea of a happy ending seems forced somehow.  Are endings ever happy?  Shakespeare’s weren’t.  Later on some of his endings were rewritten and became happy.  But even so.  Even the fairy tale’s happily ever after fails.   There’s just something unsatisfying and often ultimately sad about an ending.  A feeling of incompleteness, of being left standing by the side of the road.  The writer Anne Carson bemoaned the fact that she’d come to the end of Proust and wondered how life could go on without him.

Carla Bley, composer and bandleader, is said to have had trouble with endings.  She apparently resisted resolutions mightily but finally had to concede.  Death is a resolution of sorts.  The tempo slows to a crawl, the volume adjusts down and the breath resolves in an exhalation.  Talk about an unsatisfying ending.  If there could be a proper recap at the very least.  A summing up.  Bley restating and reinvigorating her themes before letting them off the leash to blaze through half a dozen modes and configurations, promising again and again to end only to back off just one more time and then finally, exhausting herself and the audience, allowing the resolution to take place.

Carson writes:  prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light.   In the meantime…..there are those flood waters to keep your eye on.