Bitef

A beadle a person of the »lowest standing«, inseparable from the school classroom, into whom has flowed all the melancholy of time past perfected, for he will be sitting in his chair for ever and ever and his suspicious returns to life are still another of the tricks played in the class, they should not be treated seriously... A woman in a window. The window is an extraordinary object which separates us from the world » on the other side«, from the »unknown«.. . from Death.. . The face behind the window urgently wants to convey something, wants to see something at any price; in a feeling of utter helplessness she watches everything that is happening around her, and her running commentary becomes more and more malicious and venomous; she is transformed into a Fury and her lyrical encouragements to a spring picnic end with a frenzy of terror and death. An old man in the w.c. sits in the school 100 as before, in this special place where loneliness verged on freedom. .. sitting indecently astride and immersed in endless accounts (perhaps he used to be a shopkeeper in a small tawn)... galvanized with pain and anger he carries on his not clearly defined disputes with his God ... on this scandalous Mount Sinai... An old man with a bicycle, who will not be parted from little bicycle, a piteous and battered toy from his childhood. . . he constantly goes for nocturnal trips on it, only the place has curiously shrunk to the classroom, around the benches. .. and it is not he who sits on this bizarre vehicle, but a dead child with its arms outspread ... all this takes place in night lesson and in a dream.. . A somnambulits prostitute while still at school committed notorious excesses ... she pretended to be a shop-window model, a licentious mannequin often standing naked publicly ~. it is not known whether her dreams become true later ... now, in this dream of the dead class she performs her indecent tour around the benches with the obscene gesture of exposing her breasts ~ . A woman with a mechanical eradle School » tricks « those dismaly and painfully » stripped «, » unfledged « » spotty « incidents, passed over in embarrassed silence but acknowledged as lower forms of development by adults are really the arginai »primary« matter of life. Their disinterestedness and inefectiveness in life brings them near the regions of art. They contain the nostalgia of dreams and the extremity of the last things. Their vital, »mature« fulfimenis are a ghastly, sanctioned degeneration. The woman with a mechanical cradle becomes the object of a cruel joke played by the whole class; she is chased and caught and set on a peculiar machine, which in the inventory figures as a »family machine«. Its functions are unambiguous. It should be mentioned in passing that in this theatre all mental and biological functions are usually » objectified « in a scandalous manner. For this purpose different kinds of » Machines « are used, usually rather childishly primitive, of minimal technical value but with extensive imaginary powers. The » family machine« is operated by hand and causes a mechanical opening and closing of the culprit’s legs. So that

there is no doubt that this is the ritual of giving birth, the char death brings in a mechanical cradle which is rather like a small coffin. As an already comprehensible consequence the mechanical cradle (this time literally) rocks two wooden balls giving a dry unmerciful rattle. This is the joke of the brutal char , . . birth and death two complementary systems. (All these happenings are linked in an obscure and enigmatic manner with the happenings extracted from the play, the role of which has already been discussed in the Introduction). It is not then surprising that the same woman with a mechanical cradle, subjected to further strange » ceremonies «, almost ritual spitting and pelting with rubbish sings a lullaby, which is a desperate scream , . .

9 The figures in the dead warnings™^“™ O As if stuck and patched and irrevocably, and which is to contain their whole happiness and their whole pain, the whole memory of the dead class. The final preparations for the creat game with the void are made in haste. Since all this takes place in the theatre, the actors in the dead class loyally keep the rules of dramatic ritual, assume roles in some play, but apparently do not attach very much importance to them, they act as if automatically, out of habit; we have even the impression that they ostentatiously refuse to own up to these roles, as if they were only repeating somebody else’s sentences and actions, tossing them off with facility and witohut scruples; these rules break down every now and again as if badly learnt; serious gaps occur and many passages are lacking; we have to depend on guesswork and intuition; perhaps no play is acted, and even if some creation is attempted, it is of little importance in the face of the game which is indeed being acted in this theatre of death ! This creation of illusions, the negligent improvisation, this shoddiness, this cursoriness, these shreds of sentences, these failing actions, only some intentions, this whole mystification, as if some play were really being acted, this »f utility« only these can bring it about that we have this experience and the sense of the great void and the furthest frontier of death. The sequence of the » Dead Class« séance, » Collusions with the Void«, unambiguously contains the theatrical nucleus of this Great Game.