Mono-Logue

(Note: Any performer of the piece should feel free to reassign the appropriate gender pronouns as they see fit)

There are two of us

He is always watching me

As I start to feel anxious or happy

He tells me what's happening to me

He can read the signs

He’s clever that way

I don’t know which of us is saying that

It doesn’t sound like me.

One of us knows he’s going to die one day

No, better!

One of us knows that both of us are going to die

I am not sure if we both have names

Or if it’s the same name.

Once, when we were young

And didn’t know that there were two of us

We used to weep together

When we thought that God was angry

He’s our Father

We didn’t know then

And don’t know now

don’t know if there were two of Him

then or now

There may have been…

We learned before we knew there were two of us

That there is no way to tell what anyone else is really like

We’re our own company

Our own best friends

It’s better that way

I don’t know which one of us said that.

There is no doubt a kind of safety in it

Being locked down and alone, just the two of us

A security and a community, suddenly.

When we go out for a walk in the park,

And see other people seeing us

When we see that they are as alone as we are

Swerving to avoid us, trying not to be seen to.
Avoiding being looked at.

We appreciate their agility

And wonder for a moment if they feel now the way that we do

The way we feel

Alone in our rooms, these few, comfortable rooms

With all our books and ghosts for company.

Father , son and holy ghost.

I can hear a voice

It could be my voice

Or his

He could be hearing my voice

Or I could be hearing his

I used to be very sure that it was my voice he overheard

And not his voice that I overheard

That we spoke

Whether he wanted to or not

Looking at me impatiently in the mirror

When I took my heart medicine.

I don’t know as it matters much whose voice it is.

I don’t know if he feels the same.

He reads me better than I read him

It doesn’t sound like my voice

I can hear a voice.

There is nothing else for me to hear

I used to like music and old movies on TV

Or I told myself to like them

But I never really did

I’m ashamed of myself now

Of my old enthusiasms

For games of doubt and conjecture

Infinities and such, journeys…

I look on myself now as I was then

With affectionate contempt.

Or is that him? Is that how HE sees me?

The other one.

I remember when I first discovered him

Or he discovered me.

I was unwell, and feverish

I did not feel like myself

I had been reading

In the way that I used to, before I stopped reading

Before all these books, these voices trapped in them

Started only to appal me, shouting at me for attention

Vulgar whores, exposing their ideas at me

Tempting me

Till I saw him watching me

Or he saw me looking up at him

Sweating there in bed while he looked down on me

Passive, maybe secretly smiling in a way I didn’t like

Knowing things I didn’t know

Understanding the course of my illness

Clinically. Scientifically, like he understands everything

Not “knowing” - he would eschew the pseudo religious etymology

Of the idea of knowledge –

But observing me as a subject within the evolutionary paradigm

Me and my virology, as equals,

Worthy co-inhabitants of this fleshly envelope

Bacteria and myself being coeval phenomena

in the sweated torture of limbs

my harsh breathing, my fear and conviction

that I would never breathe alone again

I spoke of him, of course

To others

To parents, God and doctors

I asked who that boy was who floated above my bed,

So wise and assured of his uniformitarianism

I was told he was an hallucination and would go away

But no, they were wrong

He has been with me ever since

A constant reminder of my inconstancy

All through my recovery

Past the point when I came to see him

See his face was mine. See he has my face

I don’t know any more about him now than then

Not really

I do not know which one of us is saying that about us.

I do know that recently I’ve been seeing more of him

He’s been easier company now that I no longer resist him

And I no longer pretend to any life without him

There is

No activity he does not mock

No learning his very presence in my life

Does not belittle

Nothing about me he does not make small.

I hate the other one secretly sometimes

I don’t know who said that

But I know he heard me say it.

Good!  Good , then!

If I am to subsume myself to him, let him subsume himself to me

Especially now that illness everywhere

Has made him and me so commonplace

When I see it in the eyes, when I catch the eyes, of the people in the park

They know now what I have known for years

They’ve discovered that they are haunting themselves

You know too.

You do know.

You know I’m not crazy.

Even so, it was a thing to do,

To undertake becoming

To silence all the noises I once used to use

To distract myself from myself. 

To lose them all, the books, the music

The flavours of food

To abjure all that

Deny all that to myself in order to hear him, see him properly

It wasn’t easy.

There were times I even thought I was wrong.

I wasn’t wrong.

It’s so clear to me now

I feel so light and free

Unburdened by pain or hope

In the present tense forever

No memory, nor future

Living here and now

Just the two of us!

Is this a state of mind?

An observable phenomenon?

You’d have to ask him.

For me it is pure experience!

I do not even doubt myself anymore!

I leave that to him!

I have always been this way!  This is the way I have always been!

That is the key to this revelation!

You wouldn’t understand.

I can see that

But sometimes when I see the eyes of the strangers in the park

Lidded and terrified, struggling with their own secrets

The desires and fears that define and confine them

That they don’t understand

That they can never see, not themselves

Then I can see that the despair I felt as a child

Helpless as the illness raped me

Shamed me, exposed me

To him, to his gaze

And that when I opened myself to him

When I left off my reserve

Left the last shred of dignity

In my soiled pyjamas

That it was freedom

Freedom to surrender myself to him

I know what you’re thinking

And there is a superficial resemblance between

Religious epiphany and my inevitable embrace of the other

I understand your confusion

And I forgive you that you know not what you do.

When you insult me and degrade me so

As to compare my new understanding of the cosmic duality

With some mere Pauline revelation.

My sickbed was not my road to Damascus!

No!

But I can see why you were thinking that.

Surrender to some all-knowing deity

Has been relief to many a tortured soul

But this is not that.

No. 

There is no relief to my despair

Of the burden of a meaningless, purposeless life.

No

There is merely the acknowledgement that

Meaning and purpose are not MY problem

They are HIS problem

That there is no soul or self as there is no God

What life may mean or what its purposes may be are no longer my concern.

I can see him, or rather, not see him

Smile at me in his secret way of his

when I say something as naïve as that!

As gauche as that!

I can just see him.

I love and hate him all at once

Like it or not, he, like God, or the soul or self

Or any such notion of that which is beyond

Immediate experience

That which cannot be touched but which sometimes felt

Like a holy ghost on a darkened stair

I found him, all of him

When I looked up when I was ill and saw his face

Which was of course, my face

But which was part of the world, the universe

Outside of me

Me!

My unconscious, lived, animal experience of being.

He was the wanderer and wonderer, not me.

He was the one who looked and saw my illness

As some Darwinian contest of atoms and quanta

Of the virus and myself.

Him, not me!

He was the one to whom it mattered what it meant.

And I don ‘t think that my giving myself to him

 was too high a price to pay for my recovery.

Me!  My recovery! My taste, touch, sensation!

My joy! My love!  My music! My poetry!

And if he has demanded since

That these should all fall silent and tasteless to me

Then that too is part of the price

Of this continuing.

If all I can see is see his face

Which is, of course, my face

If all else is silence and darkness

Going forward

Save his secret smile

Benign or maleficent

Then that too is the price of recovery.

And if for him, there is nothing to see but me

This fleshy envelope of impulses and competing bacteria

This empty universe of death

This mere appetite

This mere instinct to cling to palpitation

That I can no more wish away than I can wish away wishes.

Then that is his burden

That is what he accepts from me

That is his peace which passes understanding

I do not know which one of us is saying that.

I do not know which one of us is saying that.