Elfriede Jelinek / Version 1

In an Empty House

Once I really did see nothing in the theater, which doesn’t mean I saw nothing. On the contrary. I could see EVERYTHING that was going on down on the stage. But, hard to say, later, the bodies were being cast into a level of space like those who have fallen, and I was very high above them in the completely empty Burgtheater, well, up in the fourth balcony or so. I was sitting there secretly, so the director couldn’t see me – and others too weren’t supposed to (see) (him) and what he was trying to do with the people down there. Only he was supposed to see (the scenes) which he had just rehearsed. But before that, there was something: I was placed up there in a nest, a box, while those who were supposed to be working down below were still taking a break, and that’s how the theater was before the people below poured into that level (space) without end … completely empty for a while. So I was sitting up there, an old crow in a velvet nest which no little ones would ever enter because I, the observer without anything that she might have observed, was just as empty inside as the whole giant theater-house, no thoughts, and so, while that giant empty space poured over me from all sides (and at the same time withdrew from me again!), I waited for a movement, any moment, from below. And because I was waiting, completely calm (the most excellent movement of all!) and completely alone, it dragged me irresistibly down, ending that wonderful calm, falling into the emptiness of an unstoppable movement which penetrates into another, equally unstoppable movement, without knocking first, one that might spread across the stage level down below, like a prairie fire and simultaneously its own extinguishing, but when?, as if the bodies were being poured over the fire in buckets; and if this level of the stage were to spread out endlessly, the bodies too might keep on moving endlessly, and I would finally get to be a part in this movement which would be so carefully thought up, calculated, organized by the director and nevertheless finally without end or aim to shoot for by shooting over it. But an author never gets to be a part, has no part of a part, at the most: an author partitions. And actually, all bodies are the same in this infinite space, on this level with no finality, and thus no movement can excel another, and thus all movements are but a single one that all merge into. For nature embraces them wherever they are. I used to think: every movement had its own face, every presence its own coloring, the leaf not serving the tree, the tree not the park, where it took root … many years ago. There are solid apparitions and soft ones, if no one stops them. The director does not permit people to become close friends like trees in the forest where they grow of their own free will. Everything willing is also free not to be. That should be clear. The heavens cry: I am your friend! You can depend on me, the weather won’t be like the forecast, and the spokesman for the chorus has told you, it will be as I say! Thoughts can be ordered and collected, we can’t, we trees. Actors say the same thing, but it doesn’t help them. I am sitting up here and waiting for the director’s inevitable intrusions into life so that I can collect myself again afterwards at least in part, because I don’t like seeing people being given orders, I prefer seeing springtime green which might have preferred being another color, and is only the way it is maybe because I just like it so much. Why should I confuse something unheralded with a forecast that hasn’t come about yet but is expected, with something the forecast is supposed to be about? Up here no forecast can penetrate my emptiness anymore, and nobody down below can do anything that might even remotely be guided by my gentle touch. Even though I’m the one who wrote the play! Heaven only knows how, okay, heaven does know, but the forecast is predicting something else than what heaven was planning for today. Any moment now it’ll happen down below that the people will be yelled at so they shift their position into this or that time here or there, into some prescribed track for them down there which is actually no time, just, well: timelessness. That is why there are – no matter how much the director tortures himself – no precise positions to pass out to the people. That is exactly it! You can’t cast what they are supposed to do on stage like lots; you can’t even distribute them a basic train of thought. No, no train of thought is running here now, despite the fact those would be the only compartments where all of them might be able to unfold, where they might find their questions and answers, which the director has already addressed a thousand times. There is no determination anymore, neither for the actors down below nor for me up here in an empty space. Nothing relates to me because I am not even there! And that is why those down below cannot relate with each other. Is their movement a change of position or is it supposed to move others who are not even there at the moment? As for me up here, I can hardly move any more than Mount Dachstein way up high because nothing relates to me, and I can’t relate to anything that may soon be happening down there. Since no one knows that I am sitting up here, I am not here at all. I’ve dropped out. You won’t hear a single peep from me! (Okay, before I dare utter a sound, I’d sooner bite off my tongue!) Nature does not like emptiness. It abhors it, everyone knows that. But still everything is based on the nature of bodies – in particular the stone that drops. That is where the desire to calculate nature began. My play was the beginning of the director’s desire to calculate the bodies, and now they go into withdrawal first, even though they’ll be coming soon. They are withdrawing, still, they will have to stay longer: later. Longer? Starting when? They always get detention. They have to be nature, stay nature, but everything the director wants from them is against their nature. Good thing that I put all their laws out of commission! just by making myself invisible and then vanishing completely. Just by being placed here in an empty house without anyone knowing, everything that they shall be doing down below, downcast like me, has vanished, been gobbled up by nature before it got to be done. The ropes are fraying, and all of us shall most certainly tumble into the emptiness quite soon. The reason being: since I am missing, the site of those moving beings in the theater is nullified, and they will have to become the site themselves. Yes, they become the site by there not being anyplace for me to sit. But since there is no place for me to sit, I just go and take the place of everyone who is supposed to be acting here. Just give me your place to sit, and I’ll go check it at the cloakroom! The issue keeps building up quickly, and the one keeps changing into the other, and the bodies are being broadcast (without remote) from one site to another. I won’t give up my place to sit, I’ll swallow the whole room by disappearing continuously (disappearing as the utmost, the one and only means of self-assertion!). I don’t need room anymore (I can really just swallow it), because I am gone and won’t leave any room for all these actors to breathe although I am completely ineffective. I was once the way these actors were supposed to be, but that way is way off now. And everything the director might still want has disappeared in their bottomless dustbags, the ones they were supposed to clean their path into nothingness with and make new ones: altogether. Now the way there has dissolved into what it used to be: nature. You see, and nature is exactly what I had put out of commission! The way itself wound itself (and its goal-oriented will) up – no down – like Ariadne’s thread which rolled itself into a sleeping animal and became some kind of heavenly body describing an orbit, the most perfect movement of all, while everything down below that might still be played out (immediately, when? later, always) can only be imperfect, violent, maybe straight, no not straight!, but straight on (in Vienna people say “holdout (haltaus)” when they want something to stop), which would be the falsest movement of all.