The OMASTERS Theater Script

Sang the Nun, MUHASABI:

(The song begins, the sound of a shenai. Its timbre changes, the sound becoming that of an algaita, the double reed instrument played by the griot, or professional musicians of West Africa, in the country now called Chad, as heard on the recordings of the OCORA--an acronym in French--of the Populations Islamee as wedding music. Epithalamia. The song is a wedding song. Of yoga, art, harmony, inertia, armies, orders--the word group (linguis­tic group theory) deriving from the Proto Indo-European root ar.)

MUHASABI: Doctor Frederick von Meier.

(There is silence for a moment. The other character on stage is Wally de Clifford, of Cleveland. He is a scholar who possesses the ky (KI in Japanese, Ch'i in Chinese, etc) or KEY...to the treasure, as it were. For John Barth in the Story of the sister of Sheherazade, Chimera, "The key to the treasure is the treasure." WALLY, a man of wealth and fame, has his manuscripts. He has carried them down from the Potola like gazebo. Up there, WALLY has maintained a surveillance beam, focused on the Cliffs of Cleveland, as if to observe, godlike or Godlike, objectively what transpired there. In his files were KRYPTOCOSMIC reports to be submitted to the OMASTERS (Archetype: Tarot Major Arcanum XX). WALLY trips on the penultimate stair. The archaic Peruvian artifact in which the manuscripts have been filed, a delicate and rare Chavin Horizon polychrome ceramic piece in a nearly obscene dual figural form of two dolphins and two archaic Peruvian human beings engaged in mutual and interacting bodily contact and sexual inter-penetration, goes tumbling to the floor of the foyer of the hot springs of the TEAHOUSE OF NECESSITY, known in a distant kalpa as SAM/SARA'S, or SAM and SARAH'S CAFE, or in times and kalpas of perversion as THE COFFEE HOUSE OF AGATHA TYCHE, or somesuch.)

WALLY: (Laughing) Well, whadda we do now?

They both glance to the fire roaring in the stove--newly installed that day, as it turned out, by CHICO CARBONERI. CHICO eyeballs the scenario from the back door where he has entered with a trident like fire tool and an empty coal-scuttle, such as that in the famed Kafka vignette.

CHICO: Burn 'em.

Song.

MUHASABI: (Reading from the cover of an envelope) Doctor von Meier--was that the very same famed in song and lore of THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA produced at Columbia Records in the 1960s, late sixties, by the BIRDMAN, an avatar--lessee, of Joseph, JOSE, yes, JOSE.

WALLY: What?

CHICO: Que?

MUHASABI: JOSE QUE. I say. OK. Its OK to O'QUE
Owe Kay (Kay Jewelers, in Oakland, A-OK
O-A-K. Oak, Drus the Latin, neo-, Linnean
taxonomic for the truth, the tree, the oak
genus, the beginning, in the beginning, BARYESHT...

CHICO: She OK? (Indicating MUHASABI, who has swooned in front of the fire as though an oracular High Priestess).

WALLY: Wait.

There is silence. Not necessarily for the space of a half an hour as in the Johanine Vision of the Apocalypse at the opening of the seals (seven, to be sure, just as in Only Two Can Play This Game, by the KEYMAN, also apocryphally known as ONLY TOUCAN SPLAY THEIR GAME, ONLY 2 CAN PLAY THIS GAME, and other wrong but similar names as the numbers in the Golden Trashery of OGDEN NASHERY document also being sent, under separate cover to the °MASTERS.) Silence for about as long as that indicated on page 13 to 14 in FINEEGANSWAKE, the document being sent by JOYCE JAMES & GOLDA LACHS.

MUHASABI: (Coming, partially out of her swoom) SALAAM. Peace.

WALLY: In pieces.

CHICO: Pied as the devil's gazzaladra. You can't print that.

MUHASABI: By the laminar flow pattern of the simoon, Gnostically known to sensuous SIMON, some say fisherman others simply pieman, who couldn't write, but maybe print, or bake, as inventor of the oven, kiln, forge and furnace, whose aegis was the grimace of the Gorgon DOKTOR SIS, lady parapoisoner/medic.

WALLY: She's lapsed into analypsis again, toward the Graves.

Kurt von Meier
Circa 1974