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II Astride of a Grave; or, the State of the Art (This essay was written for a performance studies conference on "Theaters of the Dead," at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, in March 1998. Since I knew I was departing from the more anthropological expectations in that context, or the ritual manifestations ofsuch a theater, I thought a preface was in order. I've included that here, as it was there.) There may be times in what I'm about to say when I'm not quite sure what I'm saying-if not quite incoherence, a feeling of disjuncture, because some of what I'm saying was prompted, more or less directly, not by theaters of the dead but by death itself, whatever that may be. None of us, of course, is an authority on the subject, though I did have the peculiar impression, when Elin Diamond called and invited me to speak, that it was partially because my qualifications were improving. In any event, it's a subject which I've talked about before, as you will see, and, in quoting myself, I will sometimes be eliding what I said then into what I'm thinking now, with no guarantee that my thinking is more mature. There are certain passages where it may seem that I'm departing from the issue, but there I'll be referring to or explaining one or another relationship moving these reflections, which may have begun, actually, more narcissistically, when I was still in my teens and wrote a story about doing what may seem a little strange to have been doing at that age, or any age for that matter, though in a sense we do it in the theater. The story was about my staring into a mirror in order to watch myself die, which I did with a certain solemnity from time to time, though I never quite had the patience for the definitive moment-which, when the time comes, will probably escape me. Let's start with the obvious. You get older, you think about death. If you've thought of it before, you think of it more. If you're lucky, you may have to r68 / Sails of the Herring Fleet think harder, for the moment, about the death of somebody else, which may be harder or easier than thinking of your own, depending on who it is, and in any case I'm not sure. As it turns out, I've had to think over a period of some years about the deaths of friends, and I wouldn't bring it up in this context except that three of them were important to my career in the theater , and the other as a theorist thought much of performance too. He was, besides, very much taken with an idea I've long had about the theater: that its power comes from the fact that the person performing in front of you is dying in front of your eyes, as I am now, ineluctably but invisibly, existential fact, and if you think of it for a moment, theater will have appeared, precisely because you think, from whatever it is it is not, and I'm not doing anything that I wasn't doing before. But as some of you have heard me on this theme, I want to come back to my friends, about whom I'd been asked at each death to make a talk at a memorial ceremony or, for one of them, to write a sort of epilogue to a life that was written as death, or so minimally living that you could virtually write it off, or think of it only as written, it all, it all, as if its destiny were the pensum, that circuitous compulsion or echolocation of words, "all words, there's nothing else,"I the reality of the unnamable, which was the death of him after all. As for the words you hear in the theater or, for that matter, these words now-the words flying up, the body remaining below-it's as if he always knew that they were in their empty soundings the contour of silence and death, the unrepresentable ground of life, which-think of it as you will-ean only be represented, the unactable, imageless, invisible thing itself that, however perversely, we nevertheless want to see. (In that regard, the theater itself may be, as Euripides seemed to understand in his...

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