For me, editing my own book is a process of cutting. I’m in the final stages of preparing the manuscript of Word Made Flesh right now, and should be done soon, but always here and there I find a word or a phrase to prune. Though based on a much longer manuscript prepared from entries written for this blog over the past seven or eight years, Word Made Flesh is much shorter now, perhaps only a third the length of the original manuscript: the essence remains, and if it’s to be between covers, then the essence it should be. (At the right is Paul Cava‘s Heart of the Matter, which will be the cover image for the book.) There is now a Facebook page for the book here.
I’ll be reading a short section from the book at the EyeCorner Press party at the Manhattan Inn tomorrow evening. Prof. David Ian Rabey of the University of Wales at Aberystwyth was kind enough to write an afterword for Word Made Flesh, and it was gratifying to read his response, which includes:
George Hunka’s skills and experiences as a dramatist and director are manifested, refracted, in one of the most memorable, haunting and artful performances over which he has presided, this aptly and beautifully titled volume, Word Made Flesh. Here we encounter Hunka’s notated performance of the evolution of himself, man and artist, through proposition, interrogation, digression, impatience, righteous anger and a sensual delectation in thought and language. His focus is a theatre which does not seek to reproduce or represent life; but to re-present life, and the possibilities of the self in the world, in enliveningly surprising ways. …
If, as Hunka suggests, “Tragedy in America has yet to be invented,” this book suggests some starting points, with valuable eloquence. Hunka evidently takes courage from the initiatives of the American artists O’Neill and Rothko, finding indicative shapes in their darknesses. Grateful for their reach and provocations, I will personally further associate his written explorations, in this book, with those of two other properly ambitious American writers: with Anne Bogart’s purposeful drive to articulate and extol the power, potential and value of theatrical art and the thoroughness of work (and play) it properly demands; with Alphonso Lingis’s energisingly profound fascinations with surfaces and depths, the visceralities of love and horror, the terms of life and death, of affirmation and denial. But I think I will keep it on the shelf where I keep Howard Barker’s prose works (Arguments for a Theatre; Death, The One and the Art of Theatre; A Style and its Origins), because I turn to them most often to challenge determinisms and to confirm persistence. We need to know where to find such things, readily.
The full text of Rabey’s “After Words” is here.
As Rabey intuits, this is a far more personal book than I had envisioned; but if it provokes this kind of response in readers, I’ll know that the effort has been worthwhile. To whet the appetite of those who are looking forward to the book’s release, below is the “Preface for the Author” — the more melancholy of the book’s two prefaces:
A dream of a theatre. Collectively, the entries here are not a manifesto nor a theory. It is neither an academic treatise (for it lacks the apparatus that would make it useful as such) nor a textbook. It is presented here largely as it occurred to me over the seven years of its composition, winding here and there: a single thought as it emerged in the thinking. And in the body that produced that thought. I have honed and sharpened, but otherwise have left it unstructured, for it tends to no real end.
What destruction is sought is a destruction of received consciousness, not a bomb thrown into a building or a classroom, and the feelings expressed are far too self-contradictory to constitute a theory that can be of any practical use to anyone, least of all its author. They describe a theatre that does not exist, that may never exist except as an imaginative possibility in the mind of the dreamer.
And if there is any urban locus here, it is a curious one. The philosophy and work under consideration are not fictive, but they are fragmented, the individual examples distant from each other in both space and time. Perhaps their work is best considered as the dim candlelights that shine through the window of monasteries, perceived from a distance in the night, and as in the Middle Ages examples of a work and toil that goes on in the dark. And they do manage to leave their mark on the night, as the ascetics of the Middle Ages left their mark on history through their manuscripts and translations, coming down to us from another era, even another world. Seen from above the world, these dim lights are just visible here and there, loose constellations on a dark continent beneath. Perhaps these ascetics work ignorant of each other, but during the day they may conduct travels, pilgrimages, and return with a new knowledge and a faith that, in their work, they are not alone in the world, however dark the night, however great the intervening physical distance. They are community in thought, if impossible in body.
At the same time, they leap across genre. Like the pre-Socratic philosophers, whose work took the form of fragment, aphorism and poem, one can’t say that a single text is drama, this poetry, this philosophy. The lyrical beauty that courses through the pre-Socratics is the same as the beauty that courses through Beckett and Celan. So, too, it would be wrong to limit this ascetic hallucination to writers alone. Actresses and actors, designers, directors may constitute additional points in these constellations.
They constitute the quotidian fragments of which a dream of the theatre can be built. For it is a fever-dream within the skull (like the black-box theatre itself), fed like any dream by shards of the non-dreaming experience. From these dreams are constructed cathedrals, stone by experiential stone. These would eventually hold and store the manuscripts and performances, wrought with obsessional intent and discipline, for which the cities and culture do not necessarily care. The women and men of the monastery, not seeking fame or recognition, necessarily living hand-to-mouth, expecting neither payment, approval nor gratitude, have the sole desire to keep the dreams of the imagination alive, in a culture which would gladly have them criminalized or killed as a means of keeping the ideological and religious peace.
In the night air one might hear from these monestaries the catch in the throat of a woman’s orgasmic cry, smell the sweat of the male body, experienced then inscribed within the dramatic text and by the dramatic body—both of which arise from the bodies and imaginations which the words of the manuscript render viable, visible as the performed drama. It is a dream of theatre that we will not see in our lifetime, that our sons and daughters will likely not see in theirs, given the direction in which history seems to be moving: deeper into industry, administration, puritanism and materialism, producing the real, bright exposure of the catastrophes that have introduced a post-human age.
To put the names of individual artists to the candlelights would be presumptive here, not only because they may be inferred by the material presented, but also because the list would be incomplete: they define themselves in their work and intent, and they may desire to remain in the night, the more easily to conduct their work. Dreamwork is private and secret, even the description of the dream is intimate, shared only among those whom one feels secure and safe in communicating—there are dire risks involved, revelations and intimacies. But the description of the dream in drama remains necessary. Among the most important legacies that parents can leave to their children is the continuation of that dream, that such investigations are of enormous value in the dark world: a dream is a parent’s gift of love to a child, who may, after all, make further careful, personal steps to its realization.
Though the book lacks a list of acknowledgements, there are many to thank for the encouragement to pursue this project (by which I mean the dream and not the book), and many to whom no thanks are due whatsoever; this book exists, perhaps, in spite of them, ever the contrarian that I am. Word Made Flesh will be published by EyeCorner Press later this month.