DALTON: Sometimes when I was with her, she wasn't there. Alone at night in bed, I could feel her breath in my ears. No.

PACE AND DALTON: That's not it.

PACE: It wasn't just you and me.

DALTON: It was something more. Like at school. At school they teach you. To speak. They say it's math—

PACE: History—

DALTON: Geometry, whatever. But they're teaching you to speak. Not about the world but about things. Just things: a door, a map, PACE: a cup. Just the name of it. Not what a cup means, who picked it up, who drank from it,

PACE: who didn't and why;

DALTON: where a map came from, who fixed in the rivers, who'll take the wrong turn; or a door. Who cut the wood and hung it there? Why that width, that height? And who made that decision? Who agreed to it? Who didn't?

PACE: And what happened to them because of it?

DALTON: They just teach us to speak the things. So that's what we speak. But there's no past that way.

PACE AND DALTON: And no future.

—Naomi Wallace,
"The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek"

You're wondering why I haven't been writing. Your wondering flatters me.

The readiest excuse is that I've been madly rehearsing scenes from the ethereal play quoted above—directing them, that is, with my ready actors. It's going fairly well, actually; we don't have a piece yet, but we're making big strides. Should you chance to be in the Seattle area, you might swing by the Oddfellows East Hall Theatre (2nd floor), 915 E. Pine St., on a night such as January 24, or 25 at 8pm, or perhaps 2pm on the 26th, to catch a glimpse of this work and a few other (probably equally majestic) pieces of performance.

I like that image, of "pieces" of performance, pieces of music, pieces of cinema—like a rough chunk of chocolate torn from the Ultimate, the Eternal. We can witness the Eternal Cinema, the Eternal Performance, only in pieces, it seems. Who knew?