By: Jough Dempsey (with a little help from Shwuan Kahlil Ali Kahn)
Dramatis Personae: Jough and Shwuan, both young poets.
Surroundings: The Tom Jones Diner in Brookhaven, PA.
| JOUGH: | (opening door and entering) … and the story about the materfamilia in Harlem was simply outstanding. |
| SHWUAN: | Yeah, it had a certain galvanic splendor to it, I must agree. |
| JOUGH: | I hope our waitress is here. |
| SHWUAN: | I don't see her. |
| JOUGH: | Does it strike you at all odd that we just left a coffee shop and now we're coming here for coffee? |
| SHWUAN: | No. |
| JOUGH: | Oh, well. Me neither, really. Say, quel heure et-il? |
| SHWUAN: | About two-thirty, why? |
| JOUGH: | Oh, no real reason. I didn't expect the hours to have passed as quickly as they have, that's all. The sign says that we can seat ourselves. Who are we to argue with the sign? |
| SHWUAN: | Interesting question, who are we to be arguing with the… |
| JOUGH: | (interrupting) I suggest that we sit over there by the window across from the Swiss Farms drive-in window so we can make faces at le flic who's parked outside. |
| SHWUAN: | I concur. |
(They walk over and sit down. Seconds later, a waitress appears.)
| JOUGH: | What's new, Pussycat? |
| WAITRESS: | Can I get you guys something to drink? |
| SHWUAN: | I don't know. Can you? |
| JOUGH: | (shooting daggers at Shwuan) Yes please. (scrutinizes her [NAME TAG]) May I have a barium shake, Delilah? |
| DELILAH: | Uh… I don't think we have that flavour. |
| JOUGH: | Okay, (stifles laugh) then I would like a cup of coffee, please. |
| SHWUAN: | Garçon, coffee! |
| JOUGH: | Garçon means boy. |
| DELILAH: | Okey, I'll be back in a minute. |
(She exits.)
| JOUGH: | (sotto voce) Delilah's not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, is she? |
| SHWUAN: | No. I'd say she's a couple of cans short of a six-pack, for certain. She is moderately gorgeous, though. |
| JOUGH: | Yes, she is. Hang tight a few, I gotta go hit the jacks. Be back in a quick. |
(Jough leaves to go to the bathroom.)
(Shwuan examines his menu carefully.)
(Jough returns several minutes later.)
| JOUGH: | (examines the room) I've noticed something about this place. All of the managers here are white males, with cool sounding names like Joe Storm and Rich Couch. | |
| SHWUAN: | Dick Couch. | |
| JOUGH: | Right, and all of the waitresses are white, almost all blonde-haired women. All of the busboys and cooks are black men. The seats are orange. The ambient lighting is absolutely superb, and the menus are one-sheets coated in plastic. | |
| SHWUAN: | This is the ultimate stereotypical diner. | |
| JOUGH: | The performers were good tonight, weren't they? | |
| SHWUAN: | Yeah, the level of artisanship at these open mic poetry readings keeps getting better and better all the time. I don't know if I'd use the word "good" though. | |
| JOUGH: | Well, they were better than usual. It's like Charles Bukowski said, "I started writing not because I was so good, but because everyone else was so bad, and after all these years, I'm still not very good, but they're still very bad." | |
| SHWUAN: | I couldn't have paraphrased it any better. | |
| JOUGH: | So what did you think of the new piece that I performed? | |
| SHWUAN: | I'm happy you asked. I did want to talk with you about that. | |
| JOUGH: | (exasperated) Oh, man! You really didn't like it? | |
| SHWUAN: | Hush. You're so needy. You don't need me to tell you whether your work is good or not. | |
| JOUGH: | It's just nice to hear. Ego reinforcement is a rare commodity these days. Alright, let's hear it. Go on. Tell me how much it sucked. | |
| SHWUAN: | Now Jough, you know that I'm a really big fan of your work. Your poetry has a lapidary quality that is imbued with meticulous élan, and… | |
| JOUGH: | (interrupting) Uh-oh, you're buttering me up for the slaughter. (turning to a waitress who's passing by.) Pardon me sweetheart, but do you see the sword of Damocles dangling precariously above my head? (She looks at him as if he were Gandhi asking for a steak, medium rare, and walks away in disgust.) | |
| SHWUAN: | Don't act so affronted. I haven't even made fun of your poetry yet. | |
| JOUGH: | Yet. Ha! | |
| SHWUAN: | Ah, speak into the microphone, you pusillanimous coward. Take it like a man. | |
| JOUGH: | How does a man take it? | |
| SHWUAN: | Heh. | |
| JOUGH: | Nevermind. You, of all people, have got a lot of chutzpah to tell me that my work it bad. What exactly didn't you like about it? | |
| SHWUAN: | Well, if you must know, I thought that it was nonsense. It didn't mean anything. It sounded to me like you desultorily scribbled down whatever random word came to your mind. I can almost picture you sitting in your room writing like a febrile madman. (pause) It simply had no meaning. | |
| JOUGH: | (laughs knowingly) Does that bother you? | |
| SHWUAN: | Well, yeah. Poetry should have meaning. | |
| JOUGH: | Should? Archibald MacLeish said that a poem should not mean, but be. | |
| SHWUAN: | How (makes quotation marks with fingers) "zen." (rolls eyes) Archie was an idiot. | |
| JOUGH: | Well, perhaps, but I don't think you understood my poem, and that's why you didn't like it. I was trying a new style. | |
| SHWUAN: | If the style you were trying was the meaningless drivel style of incomprehensible doggerel, then you're a great success. | |
| JOUGH: | Nooooo, I was writing in Dada. | |
| SHWUAN: | Oh, you inconsequential belletrist, I should have known. | |
| JOUGH: | Do you even know what Dada is, brother? | |
| SHWUAN: | I have a vague idea. Isn't that the artistic style where the "artist" (again he makes quotation marks with his fingers) throws paint on a canvas at random and calls that art? | |
| JOUGH: | No, although Dada does include the element of chance in its practicing. | |
| SHWUAN: | So what's the deal with Dada. Explain. | |
| JOUGH: | Very well. I'm in a rather pedagogical mood anyway, so I might as well. Dada is, or rather, was, an art form started by the French during and after World War I. The artists actually met in a coffee shop in Zürich and discussed a new form of art, which became Dadaism. | |
| SHWUAN: | Where did the name Dada come from? | |
| JOUGH: | Contrary to some sources, it didn't come from the baby-speak. The leader of the movement, Tristan Tzara, a Romanian born writer and painter, flipped through a French dictionary and inserted a knife, and the point of the knife was on the word "dada," which is the French word for hobby-horse. | |
| SHWUAN: | So even the title of the movement was created by adding a random element? | |
| JOUGH: | Yeah. After naming the group, Tzara and several others, including Franz Jung, Marcel Janco, and Jean Arp, wrote the Dadaistic Manifesto, proclaiming the Dadaist ideals. The group was later joined by Max Ernst, who really got the ball rolling. | |
| SHWUAN: | The Hugo Ball rolling? | |
| JOUGH: | La ferme. Ernst was a soldier on the German front in the war, and after surviving the horrors of trench warfare, believed that the contemporary art of the time didn't further man in any meaningful way. Ernst was a firm believer in the romantic tradition that humanity was essentially good when uncorrupted by society. Dada art, poetry, and stage performances were designed to reach the audience at a subconscious level. They wanted to shock, bewilder, or make people scream in revulsion. | |
| SHWUAN: | I'm sure that they were quite successful. | |
| JOUGH: | Shut up. Unfortunately, they weren't. The movement was primarily nihilistic, and it burned itself out in less than a decade, although there was a brief resurgence in the fifties and sixties. Dada was more influential in spawning or propelling other forms of art than it was in popularizing its own. | |
| SHWUAN: | Well, what kind of art did the Dadaists make? | |
| JOUGH: | Well, they used a lot of unusual materials in sculptures, such as garbage and ordinary objects. One of the most famous Dada sculptures was created by Marcel Duchamp, who presented his Clorox Bleach Bottle. | |
| SHWUAN: | Oh, is that like Andy Warhol's Soup Can paintings? | |
| JOUGH: | Not exactly, although Warhol was one of the artists heavily influenced by Dada. No, the two works differed on the basis that Warhol's Soup Can was a simulacrum of a soup can, whereas Duchamp's Bleach Bottle was an actual bottle of bleach. | |
| SHWUAN: | Was the bottle full? | |
| JOUGH: | Je ne sais pas. | |
| SHWUAN: | Let me get this straight. Duchamp presented an ordinary bleach bottle as his sculpture? | |
| JOUGH: | Yes. | |
| SHWUAN: | What's the difference between his bottle, which he called art, and an ordinary plastic container that you'd find on the shelf in the supermarket? | |
| JOUGH: | Nothing. | |
| SHWUAN: | Than how is it art? | |
| JOUGH: | It's art because he called it art. As an artist, his pronouncement of an object d'art made it so. | |
| SHWUAN: | That's ridiculous! By that rationale, anything can be art. Hell, everything is art! | |
| JOUGH: | I think you're beginning to understand that one aspect of Dadaism. Like Oscar Wilde wrote, "Art creates life." | |
| SHWUAN: | Oscar also wrote that "All art is quite useless." | |
| JOUGH: | Yeah, but I think he meant that as irony. | |
| SHWUAN: | Why did Duchamp put his name on it though. If he claims it is art, then truly the Clorox company is the artist. | |
| JOUGH: | I disagree. They produced a commercial product. It was Duchamp's pronouncement of it that made it art. He referred to pieces of art like these as "ready-mades." | |
| SHWUAN: | Well, to me, Dadaism sounds like a lot of untalented people fueling their own egos by calling themselves artists. | |
| JOUGH: | Why are you being so fastidious about this? | |
| SHWUAN: | Because I don't understand this at all. I don't like things that I can't understand. This just seems so narcissistic. | |
| JOUGH: | It is a very self-absorbed movement, but don't forget Shwuan, Narcissus fell in love with his reflection not because it was beautiful, but because it was his. | |
| SHWUAN: | Dadaism is terribly strange. | |
| JOUGH: | Really, I think that you're overreacting. It's not unusual in the least. It's simply different than what you're ordinarily accustomed to thinking about. | |
| SHWUAN: | So what other kinds of things did they do? | |
| JOUGH: | Richard Hülsenbech made extremely complex machines with thousands of moving parts that served absolutely no purpose. Duchamp took a print of the Mona Lisa and painted a mustache on her and wrote a "crude" phrase on the painting. | |
| SHWUAN: | What did he write? | |
| JOUGH: | Perhaps it would be prudent if I didn't say. By the way, where's our evanescent waitress? | |
| SHWUAN: | Who cares? What about literature, since I really do want to discuss your new poem? What did the Dadaists contribute to poetry? | |
| JOUGH: | Well, in the aforementioned Dadaistic Manifesto, Tzara named three different types of poems. You have to bare in mind, Shwuan, Dada did include chance, but it wasn't meandering. There was a definite purpose to the art. The bruitistic poem showed an object as it is. There is nothing outside of what you see, and the object was merely described in its simplest detail. The second form, the simultaneous poem, teaches the meaning of the jumbledness of all things. For example, while we're talking in a diner, a cop is outside reading the newspaper, a child is being born in Tierra Del Fuego, and a lawn jockey is holding a lantern on a lawn in Fresno. The concomitant world was represented. The third form is the static poem, and this one is a bit more complex. The static poem makes individuals of words, which grow out of them and into woods, and wild boars are created out of three letters in words from the woods. In the static poem, words and ideas grow out of others before it, as each line and each word in the line spawns what comes before it. It's a symbiotic poem, or sorts. One idea begets another, which begets another, which alters the original idea, which begets another and so on ad infinitum. It's a vicious circle. The static poem is nothing that its name would imply. Of course, none of the Dadaists were practitioners of the forms in the Dadaistic Manifesto. | |
| SHWUAN: | Now I'm confused. | |
| JOUGH: | As well you should be. The writers of the manifesto were against manifestos in general, and especially the Dadaistic Manifesto. Like the last line said, if I can remember it correctly: To be against this manifesto is to be a dadaist! | |
| SHWUAN: | I wonder how the Dadaists would have reacted to the idea of causal determinism. | |
| JOUGH: | Well, the idea that the way things happen is the only way that they possibly could have happened would horrify the Dadaists. They believed strongly in free will and the exercising of it. They certainly weren't hip to the notions of fate and destiny. | |
| SHWUAN: | Let's recap, so I can get a bearing here. Dadaist poets would simply write whatever they wished for the soul purpose of shocking or confusing an audience to do… what? | |
| JOUGH: | To force the audience to re-evaluate their concept of art itself. They were protesting all aspects of Western culture, especially the art world, which they were a part of. It was a very anti-aestethic movement. Do direct your question to the poem that I performed tonight. What did my work make you feel? | |
| SHWUAN: | (smiling) Pathos. | |
| JOUGH: | You didn't enjoy it, even a little bit? What about the leitmotif of the talking rain, leading up to the final envoi where I proclaimed that the engine was on fire, and was taking us all home? | |
| SHWUAN: | Yawn. Yawn. I didn't like your poem, and I don't want to seem like I'm acting superiour to you, commenting insouciantly about your lack of style, I just didn't like it. Perhaps others will. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. I am, however, intrigued about the idea of non-directional verse. Is Dada anything like a stream of consciousness writing? | |
| JOUGH: | Dada is more like a stream of unconsciousness. Dadaism eventually disintegrated and evolved, or devolved, however you want to look at it, into Surrealism, which was a much more intellectual, self-conscious pursuit. | |
| SHWUAN: | This sounds a lot like Jack Kerouac's Essentials for Spontaneous Prose. | |
| JOUGH: | Kerouac was influenced by the Dadaists, or at least what they stood for. | |
| SHWUAN: | Which was? | |
| JOUGH: | Nothing. | |
| SHWUAN: | That’s a tough cause to stand behind. | |
| JOUGH: | The apathy rally has been canceled due to lack of interest. It's like the picketers outside the White House chanting "We won't protest! We won't protest!" Its inherent absurdity eliminates logical or rational thinking about it. There is a simple, esemplastic brilliance to Dada that made it, in my humble but accurate opinion, a terribly charming movement. The best way to explain Dada is to live it. To define it is to limit it. I'd have to say that Dada is a way of life. The tulips are strangling Amsterdam, the birds are flying into the underground the green green grass of home. | |
| SHWUAN: | Nonsense! Nonsense! | |
| JOUGH: | Yes, but I noticed that you were cheering for it that time, instead of making disparaging remarks. | |
| SHWUAN: | So, you really like Dada, huh? | |
| JOUGH: | Man, I dig it with a shovel. | |
| SHWUAN: | Ah well, chacun à son goût. What did you title the poem again? | |
| JOUGH: | I haven't, as yet. If you have any suggestions, I'd recommend you hook me up with some input action before I have to give you the beat down. (Jough raises his arm as if he were about to administer a beating to Shwuan.) | |
| SHWUAN: | Hey! Don't you threaten me. Wait! I've got it! How about: "Bend Over and Spread 'Em: Jough's Journey Into Dada" ? | |
| JOUGH: | Va te faire fous. I figure that you're either on the bus or off the bus. If you don't want to synch your movie to mine, then you just won't get to go furthur, that's all. If you don't want to help, just say so. | |
| SHWUAN: | I just want to make sarcastic comments at your expense. | |
| JOUGH: | Bite my crank, Pedro. | |
| SHWUAN: | C'mon mon semblable, mon frere, let's get out of here. It appears that we're not going to get served. Do you want to go somewhere else? | |
| JOUGH: | Yeah. This is a beat scene. | |
| SHWUAN: | Let's go to that other diner; the one with the surly hostess. | |
| JOUGH: | Monsieur, you know me. I'm all over that action. Let's get some coffee. |
(Exeunt.)
-fin-
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