Re: RAT Lurking online

[NOMADMONAD@aol.com]

But fire and story were always such loving mates.  Our twin protectors.

Also doesn't ritual belong best to firelight in some dark and secret cave?  
Christians in the Roman catacombs and such.  The invention of The Book was 
then and there.  Prior to this there was the scroll.  But these lurkers 
needed something they could fold and close quickly when the threat 
approached.  An audience on the edge of their seats and ready to escape with 
their word, their flesh.

And the-city-with-a-thousand-stories-to-tell is not a daylight circumstance; 
it's something that beckons to the traveler from a distance at night with its 
flickering lights. 
.
A computer monitor shows its meaning best in a quiet dark room.  The soft hum 
and eerie blue light of our new story.

--nick

In a message dated 1/31/00 4:13:12 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
shadowtackle@att.net writes:

> Holy moly, this is true and scary. I'm often troubled by 
>  the us/them split theatrical lighting invents; as often I 
>  like the split, lurk in it, take (critical) power from 
>  it. Daylight theater has had a good run and could maybe 
>  come back - we often put heavy capital towards creating 
>  the illusion of sun through factory windows, when we 
>  could... have sun coming through factory windows and do 
>  our work in broken canneries, etc. without insurance ins 
>  in productive despair of permanence.
>       Or the dark/light difference could be seen to mark 
>  difference in roles and not separation of ultimate 
>  purposes or uses. One character is named A, one B and one 
>  Audience; there is no hiding, there is collective 
>  manufacture of the Big Meaning (the Big What Have You) 
>  with separate skills. I don't understand the e medium 
>  well enough to say this union of distinctions is 
>  possible here; so much goes towards distinction. There's 
>  a glass wall between me and my words, cable between me 
>  and you, time betweeen thought and response... Novocaine 
>  Theater. But this may be a problem of my unfamiliarity. 
>  Could get to be like breathing and coughing - the natural 
>  sounds Cage made a part of his scores (audiences 
>  immediately culpable of particiapation; that's what I 
>  miss here - immediate culpability; so much mediation 
>  lends anxiety).