The simile is a frayed rope that is stitched stronger in a comparison tenuously linked with words like ‘like’ or ‘as’ and the comparison becomes taught, unbreakable because the word is taught, unbreakable.
I am like a flower. I may not be much of a flower. But, I am like one.
The metaphor is like a taught rope fraying, slowly unraveling when symbolically, poetically, inherently, an image becomes something other than it is, yet still is what it is. As if the image sanctifies itself into truth: the symbol is the image, is the want, is the paradoxical need.
I am a flower: I am not a flower; I am actually a flower.
In theatre, what is strange, magical, unreal, concretes unto the stage, spokenly moved into the real—the actual presence that is whimsically drifting in and out of itself in order to communicate what it is, what it will be, what it wants to be within its ancient structure compelling itself into definite form so that it can flee into the nebulous nature that it habits and nature ordered naturally in its absurd curiosities doesn’t compel theatre into itself but forms it into image into the upside down, the manic, the crazed, the desolate—fruitful compositions that must play into the absurd so that the need may express what the deep speaks to it. There, in the silent speaking, the fragile breaks and is made whole, made strong in the breaking.
“So there is either the author who explores his inner experience in depth and darkness or else the author who shuns these areas, exploring the outside world—each one thinks his world is complete. If Shakespeare had never existed we would quite understandably theorize the two can never combine. ” (Peter Brook, The Empty Space.)
“Dramatic practice must pose knowledge against information, speculation against journalism, imagination against evidence. This is to say it must re-enter the darkness from which it emerged. This darkness is primarily an absence.” (Howard Barker, Arguments for a Theatre.)
“Brecht and Beckett are both contained in Shakespeare unreconciled.” (Peter Brook, The Empty Space.)
Answer and Rebuttal
A Play in Some Acts
Innocently and wondrously, TRAVELLER crosses the stage and exits. As TRAVELLER exits, CRAWLER crawls around and within a malformed box like they are suffocatingly aged, yet very, very, very, young, but breathes freely and expresses that freedom in crawling, until TRAVELLER returns, a book etched on bark worn into curiosity, entering the stage from the same place they entered previously.
TRAVELLER: I have traversed the world staring at the sky, staring at the soil, staring at the liquid remnants that surround me—right side up upside down. I am awe. I have seen everything, everything, and you are not what I have seen.
TRAVELLER overturns the box and the box breaks and CRAWLER is no longer free but trapped against the bark of an aged and suffocating tree, exasperated in their suppressed expressions to LOVER who is on the opposite side of the tree so that TRAVELLER transforms into COURAGEOUS and breaks forth into the tree, the impetus for CRAWLER and LOVER to traverse the trunk on opposite sides of each other so they still don’t see each other and still the distance and still the exasperation that unhinges LOVER colluding their pain by eating BARK. The chewing is so loud that CRAWLER gnarls into the tree with their elongated nails that are teeth until BARK collapses and kills LOVER.
CRAWLER: You presume knowledge from sight. I cannot condone it.
TRAVELLER: What then shall I presume?
A sudden and exquisite silence.
LOVER: The collusion existed before death existed—if death exists.
CRAWLER builds a box from the blood and BARK and begins crawling within it. As they crawl, BARK travels with it. Then, in incredible pain and savagery, TRAVELLER crosses the stage and exits.
CRAWLER: When I move, I am blind. I cannot see and I am trauma. In awe of trauma, I am free. Again. Always. Free. And again.
The play is like a flower.
Then, it is a flower.
Am I flower then?
Answer and rebuttal: the simile is like a metaphor.