MEDVIEDENKO: Why do you always wear black?
MASHA: I am in mourning for my life...

The Seagull
Anton Chekov

Scene 1

A black, cavernous space.
Snow is tumbling from the sky.
There is a crow in a birdcage, to one side.
There is a woman: CORVUS.
Her face is pale. She has black hair. She wears a black coat.

I am black, not a blackbird, but black. A crow. And yet I want to be a bluebird. Blue. With wings the colour of sky. Without the burden of sin. I must confess. For I have sinned. I am alone with my blackness. Borderless, in this dark.

I belong to no one. I know nothing. And yet I am yours. I am not beautiful, neither angel nor saint. I could be yours. Though I can give you only lies. Beautiful lies. I am a seagull ... No, that's not it. I am an actress. Face blank, heart black. This is not my story. No, this is not my story. I accept a part that is not mine to play.

I am black, not a blackbird, but black. A crow. You cannot accept me? Why not? My desire is limitless. I want to be light, like a butterfly. I am purifying myself from existence. No, do not accept me. Let me stay awhile, in the dark.
 
 

Scene 2

WHAT HAVE MY OPTIONS BEEN?

Act. Air. Amazons. Arachne. Anna Karenina. Barbarian. Bitch. Breath. Cassandra. Child-killer. Chthonic. Circe. Cordelia. Clytemnestra. Corpse. Cunt. Danae. Death. Desdemona. Electra. Emma Bovary. Empty. Eve. Fertile. Fluid. Gertrude. Heart. Hecate. House. Invisible. Iphigenia. Irrational. Isabel Archer. Jocasta. Judith. Kali. Katherine. Lady Macbeth. Lavinia. Lilith. Lolita. Mad. Madame de Rênal. Madonna. Mary Magdalene. Matter. Medea. Medusa. Menstrual. Metaphor. Mistress. Molly Bloom. Moon. Mother. Multiple. Murderess. Muse. Nature. Night. Nina Zaryechnaia. Negativity. Nun. Nurse. O. Obscure. Ocean. Ophelia. Other. Pathos. Passion. Past. Phaedra. Pillaged. Philomela. Polluted. Prey. Primordial. Querulous. Raped. Ravaged. Receptacle. Riddle. Sensitive. Silenced. Slave. Slut. Styx. Tamora. Unreasonable. Villanelle. Virgin. Water. Wet. Whore. Witch. Womb. Ximena. Yours. Zero.
 
 

Scene 3

There is film footage projected within a small rectangular frame, of a 
train ride through snowy country.

CORVUS, sober, sits on a chair to one side of the space. 

I clawed my way from my mother's cunt and fell onto the snow.

If I said 'pardon me,' she didn't take heed. Since then I have been in exile.

Already I had memories, but they could not see it. I had language, but they could not recognise the yearning in my bleating cries. I bled unforgivable red onto white, a parcel as abject as anything fetched from a butcher's shop.

Would they have forgiven me that sin, being born bleeding, broken and impure, had I been born a boy? Had my small penis risen sharply into the air and deigned to challenge? Is the clitoris so insignificant because it is not asking to be heard all the time? Because it cannot hurt anyone?

I was not given a name. That was the punishment I had to bear for staining the earth covered with mirrors and glass. Without a name, I could not enter their stories. I was not spoken to and I could not be spoken of.

The place where I was born was a geography of entrapment. White, white, white. Rarely did the snow seem soiled. Everything appearing against the landscape, a tree, a hut, a well, an old car, seemed only capable of tearing the freezing world apart for a moment.

When I grew into a child, I often fantasised about the life I would lead. Fists clenched. Spine rocking. Eyes closed. Mouth open in rapturous prayer. The life I would lead when I was fully grown. O please god, bequeath me any other life but this.

Each wordless prayer was an abandoning of faith, a refusal to inhabit fully the corridors through which I passed. I was not praying to any man. I constructed no effigies.

I dissolved myself into my selves. Nothing begot nothing. I constructed an empty space from and for my selves.

Yet when I set out on foot, I saw my image on the ground, halo frozen into the snow. Having never realised what I looked like and overcome by a sense of shame, I tried to ignore this physical manifestation of myself. I read books. And imagined.

Yes. O god, anything but this.

I saw my books as vast beacons, nestled in the fearful dark. I felt so black; I welcomed the whiteness of the page. I read to become the other. Any other but me. Torches that revealed, reveal, possibility. Potentiality.

And the assumption was always that my dream life would be a more luminous reality than the place from which the imagining began.

For the imagining began in the dark.

My fictions were composed of infinite intersections of light, springing from black bud. Reality then, could only be known through feeling, fire underneath blind skin. My future life then, was that unknowable terrain beyond the gates of snow.

My heart was, is, filled with black bud. Buds that will never open.

How is it that a child senses so acutely the darkness within herself?

That she proofreads reality through the lens of this darkness?

When I was a child I feared I would never grow up, my mind and soul imprisoned in my small body, condemned to live like a crow, condemned to chase redemption across two hundred years.

I decided to call myself Corvus, the Latin name for the crow.
 
 

Scene 4

A library.

I want to fly, full of lightness. To be a sparrow, a bluebird, a blackbird, a wren. Small and buoyant. Easy in the air. I want to move through stories, through the ages. I want to glide across the years. I want to peel the moments away from me like skins. To haunt the wings of the poet. I want to pepper the prayer book with whispers of love and dreams of love. I want to be a sparrow, a bluebird, a blackbird, a wren. Little darting angels. In search of the sky, a cool branch, a blackberry. Meadows and hedges and horse's manes and ears of wheat. Orchards and gardens of vegetables. I want song and laughter. I want liberty in the true sense of the word. I want to free the word from its captors. I want to unlace rhetoric and bury it in truth. I want to redeem myself. To drown in the moment, rather than drowning in the stain of being. Broken and incomplete. The stain of being a crow. A crow, heavy with the burden of sin. A crow, heavy with the burden of a whole epoch. The crow lives for two hundred years.

A crow is condemned to watch death seek light. A crow is condemned to watch darkness ravage the human face. To watch holocausts efface history. Condemned to witness movements rise and crumble, returning to dust. A crow lives with the seemingly endless burden of selfhood. The burden of not being able to erase consciousness. The burden of being a witness. The burden of knowledge that nothing negates. The burden of remembering when governments decree tyrannous censorship. And also the burden of watching whole nations commit the same folly again and again. Eyes frozen with silent screams. Glazed with the burden of impotence, inaction. The crow sees the human act as a ceaseless virus mutating in the face of threat, surviving everything, even itself. Dancing in the despotic afterglow of the mushroom cloud. The crow moves with an unbearable weight, fashioned from all the world's night, inside herself. The crow flies from nightmare to nightmare, infecting mythologies, polluting the transparent drop of rain, of flame. The crow flies sickly though black wave after black wave, the ocean floor concealed by oil.

CORVUS opens a book. A paper bird flies out.
 
 

Scene 5

Two chairs.
CORVUS sits on one of them. The other is empty.

Spotlight on the empty chair.
I'm sorry. I don't think this is going to work out.

Spotlight on CORVUS.
What's not going to work?

Spotlight on the empty chair.
Us. You. And. Me. You're so closed. I feel like I try to reach towards 
you, but you're forever slipping away.

Spotlight on CORVUS.
Oh. I see.

Spotlight on the empty chair.
Is that all you've got to say to me? After all this?
Pause.
No, I should have expected this from you. No response. Cold eyes. 
Not even a blink.

Spotlight on CORVUS.
What do you want from me?
Louder.
What do you want from me?
Louder.
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?

Spotlight on the empty chair.
The truth.

Spotlight on CORVUS.
This seems rather like an interrogation.

Spotlight on the empty chair.
I brought you a flower.

CORVUS uncovers a flower from her lap. She holds to her face, 
smells it.

Spotlight on CORVUS.
My heart is a bud, eternally nascent.

Spotlight on the empty chair.
Please don't do this. Please don't hide behind your words.

Spotlight on CORVUS.
What do you want from me?

Spotlight on the empty chair.
I've just told you that it's not going to work. See? I can't go through 
all of this. This isn't living. This isn't being together. I don't know. I 
just wanted to see if I could push you to say something. Something 
real.

Spotlight on CORVUS.
Real?

Spotlight on the empty chair.
Yes, real. Naked. Stripped. Exposed.

Spotlight on CORVUS.
You're turning away from me.

Spotlight on the empty chair.
Yes, I have to do this for myself.

Spotlight on CORVUS.
I know.

Spotlight on the empty chair.
Didn't I mean anything to you?

Spotlight on CORVUS.
Light. You were my light.

Spotlight on the empty chair.
I don't understand you.

Spotlight on CORVUS.
I have to go.
 
 

Scene 6

ON LEAVING

CORVUS sits on the ground, on snow. She folds paper aeroplanes, 
letting some of them go as soon as she has finished constructing them. 
The others, she sets alight.

To leave, not to be left. This is what I want. To be free to fly. To fly on a whim. I want to leave, to assume the power to choose. I want to end the performance. I want to abandon the stage. I want to open my wings. The black wings, laden with dust. I want to stretch them out, radiant in the night and ascend into the air. I cannot act. For the curtain that is to fall is made of iron.

I am my own prison guard. I am the audience. I am my own judge. I impose the maximum penalty on every ray of consciousness, every beat of the fallible heart. THE HOLOCAUST. HIROSHIMA. VIETNAM. CAMBODIA. SUDAN. BOSNIA. AFGHANISTAN. IRAQ. Histories that conceal the individuality of the face. I did not act. I measure time by the unfulfilled gesture. The nascent act. That which is not achieved in the split cell of the moment is an informer, waiting to testify. I did not act.

I want to end the performance. I did not act. Leaving is fleeing from door to door, from what might be. I dissolve myself into the viscous other. Yet the other mutates, turns into a soldier. For every man that falls, there is another behind him, the same as the one he has replaced. The man with a stars for eyes and a loaded pistol, pointed. Hamlet, then Hamlet again. Until the end of the world.
 
 

Scene 7

When my father hanged himself, he took his last breath and then vomited up earth. He was found buried, to his waist, in sweet earth. The wall he built. For himself. Inside himself. From soil, soft like a ballad. I never saw the wall. But I felt it. [CORVUS begins to dig in the snow.] I WANT TO FIND THE WALL. To destroy it. I want to TAKE BACK THE EARTH for myself. When he was alive, I dug and I dug. I gave myself to him. But then the wall turned to stone. There was no common place. I cried, after he was gone, but my tears turned to ice. He returned to the soil once more. He vomited bulbs and tubers. Seeds. He orchestrated Genesis. But I was frozen by the air, whose edge is a knife. Too thin, too frail, to intrude into any field of vision. Crumpled, like a memory that some man has abandoned. I get the dial tone. I just keep hearing the dial tone. You are no longer alive to me. I am an angel. A paper angel, hanging with twine wrapped around my neck, presiding over nothing. WRENCHED FROM THE EARTH.
 
 

Scene 8

Darkness.
A confessional.
A light bulb hangs over the priest's chair.
The priest's voice is taped. His part is spoken by CORVUS.

CORVUS: I had a dream the other night.
PRIEST: Tell me, my child.
CORVUS: I gave birth to my heart.
PRIEST: What happened?
CORVUS: Something was pulsating. Then I had an orgasm.  Everything was warm. Glowing. A lamp went on, in the dark of my mind. I looked down between my legs. There was a heart. Little. Beating. Bloody. Against my black fur. I think it was my  heart.
PRIEST: You had an orgasm in your dream? Or as you were dreaming?
CORVUS: I don't know. Both. No. Um.
PRIEST: Were you thinking impure thoughts?
CORVUS: No father, I did not have impure thoughts.
PRIEST: Were you touching yourself?
CORVUS: No father, I was not touching myself.
PRIEST: And it was your heart that you gave birth to? An anatomical heart? Human? Bleeding? Meat?
CORVUS: Yes.
PRIEST: Your heart?
CORVUS: Yes.
PRIEST: My child, you must seek counsel from God. I cannot  ascertain what this dream means.

The door of the confessional opens.
A bloody heart falls onto the ground. A crow flies out.
The light swings and then turns off.
 
 

Scene 9

CORVUS stands in front of a white screen.
'She is indefinitely other in herself',* is projected onto the screen. 
There are mirrors positioned in the space so that they reflect each other. Wires criss-cross the space.

A soundscape. It sounds like dawn. There are birds chirping. The following text is for the sound scape. It must be spoken mechanically - with many pauses of varied lengths - and repeated for the length of the scene.

[She. She is. She is indefinitely. Indefinitely other. In herself. She is. Other in herself. She is indefinitely. She is indefinitely other. Is in herself. Other indefinitely she. She. She is. She is herself. She is in other indefinitely. She herself is in other indefinitely. Indefinitely. She. She is indefinitely. Herself is other. Herself is indefinitely she. She. She is. She is indefinitely other. Indefinitely is she other. She is indefinitely other in herself.]

For each moment,
there will be another body.
Another body that breathes.
Black bleeding into the dark.
A vanishing act. Can you
see me? Traversing the high wire?

Throw your knives
at me. Blades that are words.
Lava erupts. Threatens.
Gleams. A hand holding
the heart. The light intruding
into the act. Uncertain.

Enfold me into your
day. Accept the pieces of me
that I feed you. Black
bleeding into the dark. A woman
of bones. A battered angel.
A shattered angel haunting
the periphery. A crow.

I come to you 
through your doors. Through
your windows. Humming a tune
of shadows and beasts.
Unholy. A crow. A hole. Nun.
The ashes of a nun.

Impious. Black bleeding
into the dark. Broken.
Your shadow and your ghost.
A crow that cannot fly.
An angel without wings.
A non-entity. Dreaming
of my own body. Spilt.

Fractured. Dispersed. Beaten.
Split. Stabbed by the knives
on the high wire. I see
my reflection in the endless
mirrors. What a prophecy!
Multiple, but dead.
Endless, but bud. Black bud.

My heart is a black bud.
A flower that will never open.
The audience see my stab
wounds. Bleeding. Red. Black.

I have fallen. I cannot remember
the trajectory. They recoil
in horror. I see their mouths open
in the mirrors. My eyes
dance only for them, not you. 
I am a text without a dream
beyond the line.
 
 
 
 

Notes

* '"She" is indefinitely other in herself' - from Luce Irigaray's 'This 
Sex Which Is Not One' in New French Feminisms, edited by Elaine 
Marks and Isabelle de Courtiviron. Schocken Books, New York, 
1981, p103.