Tempest Sketch [circa 2002]

Prospero opens his heart to the world. To spite infection, he has sanitized his theater through both chemical and alchemical means. A massive looking glass is suspended above him as he sits in a simple but comfortable chair. Gazing up at his own reflection, he sees the flesh of his chest pulled back in four diagonal folds. He is focused, but allows his mind to faintly absorb and pass thoughts like lemon water. These diagonals. Since my head points northward, these four compass points of skin correspond to the eighth-corners of my map: northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest. Within the red-sauced diamond of his chest, he sees the ribs temporarily weakened with one of his ingenious salves and bent upwards toward the looking glass. This bone cage within me looks now like one of Caliban's uncooked lamb dinners. Within the two semi-circles of jutting bone, he regards his lungs, still ballooning with everybreath air. The lungs are parted like curtains. Act One, he jokes.

He is now a witness to his own unfathomable life mystery. Am I the first? Are there others with such time on their hands and such tools at their disposal that have crossed this threshold before me? His peering scrutiny moves from the reflection of his sinewy, clenched musculature, painted blue and red with a web of wedded veins and arteries, to the reflection of his own eyes, now dilated from the herbs that will inhibit pain for the duration of his need. Does hubris motivate me? Is it my own inflated self-worth that has put me here? He stares deep into the twin wells of his own eyes, looking for a clue.

"Narcissistic horseshit," he whispers aloud. I am driven by forces beyond myself, external to myself, forces that conspire to lift up the world, and shake off the loose dirt. I am a conduit of these forces, but they are my master as much as I am theirs. Conduits? He glances at the light sources placed around the chair, the light waves travelling up into the looking glass and bouncing back down into the cavity of his chest. He thinks of the blinding filaments within these globes, and the thin copper wires that connect them, and then, of the tubing that connects his laboratory to the music room. Ariel and Caliban are there in the music room now, out of sight and unable to disrupt him, playing the instruments and compositions he has created for them; Ariel's watery strings and woodwinds accompanied by Caliban's restrained percussions. Their music serves the two-fold purpose of aiding his concentration and breathing while informing him of the often troublesome whereabouts of his muse and slave.

Their song sounds something like this.