Sarah Guilbault | how to perform an absence

Set the stage, empty (apart from too many objects), with a gaping maw at the back. Enter through the throat, pushing aside the uvula. Perhaps a vulgar physical gesture with the hanging fleshly thing if the audience seems amenable, and especially if they don’t. With an already loose jaw, try a Shakespearean O. Another. And another. Stare at the audience. Will them to respond, to O back, to combust moan by moan into ecphonetic noise. If not now, perhaps later.

Invite someone to play tic tac toe. Remind them it is called noughts and crosses outside of the states. They’ll go first because they’re a guest to this nowhere that you now share. What will be your utensil? What will make the course? What will make a marking? A folding chair and high lamp and a mop. make do. and for markings there is lipstick and a zero-calorie chocolate bar. Try to make the O’s perfectly. Inevitably fail. The chocolate bar probably breaks, or it doesn’t and that’s worse. One of us loses the game and they return to the audience with a prize, a balloon animal O, that is all you can make, but it still isn’t perfect, it has an x at the bottom.

Try to catch the moon. the biggest O we can see, not quite as big as the sun, but the sun is hot and the moon seems softer. can’t a cow jump over it? or a child fish from it, when the moon is half full. why do we call the moon full and do not call it empty? it waxes and wants, gets fuller and then doesn’t it empty out?

It’s febrile, this show. It’s a fisheye view. It’s a birth. The crowning. Or no no no we’ve got it wrong no that’s not the absence, that’s the shudder and spasm of an empty uterus once the afterbirth has pulsed out. once the baby is held, all there there, ready to be wiped off and suckled. It is present. what is an absence? lack? a solar eclipse, totality. madness amid sanity. that which cannot be recognized or reconciled. and on the other side it feels pointless, the point is pointlessness, or pointillism—a pen poking into the page in an attempt to summon what next?