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The Voyeur

CAST OF CHARACTERS
EDGAR,	a male Marine Biology student
NAIRA,	a female Marine Biology student
DR. KING,	the voyeur
Playing time: about 10 minutes

[EDGAR has assumed the throne. NAIRA operates the slide projector. Image #1 = The Starcross.]

EDGAR: In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is Doctor King.1)

NAIRA: An eye for an eye.

EDGAR: Neptune’s photogenic realm. Life goes on for the Poriferans, Molluscans, Anthropods... [Music offstage] I’m losing my mind.2) I hear a violin.

NAIRA: My neighbor. Practicing.3)

EDGAR: What’s he practicing?

NAIRA: She.

EDGAR: What’s she practicing?

NAIRA: Marine Biology.

EDGAR: Starfish and sea urchins. Diverging and converging, suboceanic Evolution runs its course — survival of the fittest, primitive life giving rise to more diversified life forms; this needs to be understood. Nature favors simple solutions. Complexity is merely an accident of diversity. Simplicity is the true mother of invention in the natural world, and the odds against complexity are staggering. In 1968 there were eleven main branches of the animal kingdom that had sea-dwelling members.4) Naira?

NAIRA: Edgar.

EDGAR: The two adult sperm whales, please.

NAIRA: Oh. Sorry. My cue. [She presses the transport button. Image #2 = The Watergate.] Cachalots.

EDGAR: Thank you, Naira. The two specimens we see here are sperm whales — most of you can probably discern from the ridges of their backs and the tail fins. The name sperm whale is derived from spermaceti, the oily wax found in a storage tank located in their square-fronted heads. Spermaceti is lighter than water, and formerly scientists believed that this juice helped the animals to stay afloat. Today it is thought to be connected with the whales’ amazing ability to dive deep and come up fairly quickly without suffering the bends, the agonizing pain that humans get when they surface too rapidly from an underwater dive.

NAIRA: My goodness.

EDGAR: The next slide, please.

EDGAR: Next.

EDGAR: Next.

EDGAR: Go back one.

EDGAR: Yes. The neopolina, a mollusk. One of two creatures having survived almost unchanged from the earliest beginnings. (Difficult to make out here.) Next.

[5 Ballz.]

NAIRA: Coelacanth.

EDGAR: A peculiar looking fish named coelacanth. A true survivor. Next slide.

[The projector light winks out.]

NAIRA: Now what?

EDGAR: Evidently the light bulb burned out. Doctor King predicted it would.

NAIRA: He predicted the light bulb in the projector would burn out?

EDGAR: He gave me a spare bulb.

[The Ballroom.]

NAIRA: Where is it?

EDGAR: In my coat pocket. He predicted The Blackout.5)

NAIRA: That’s weird, Edgar. Get the light bulb.

EDGAR: (An eye for an eye.) No.

NAIRA: What? You’re not thinking of quitting, are you? We have a whole box of slides we haven’t looked at.

[Plinth Park.]

EDGAR: Random selection.

NAIRA: Doctor King said that the Chordata phylum must be shown as three evolutionary strands.

EDGAR: Tunicates, lancelets and vertebrates; vertebrates and quasi-vertebrates. Fate, a fluke. May it be instructive to let the slides organize themselves in the right order.6)

[Reflections.]

NAIRA: You mean... [She picks up several slides and throws them in the air.] Whoopee! Some of us perceive more than others?

[Vertigo.]

EDGAR: Nonsense.7)

NAIRA: You know what I would rather do? Change the light bulb, Edgar.

EDGAR: If you insist. Let’s revolutionize the procedure. [He snaps his fingers.] Voilà! [French accent] Ze light bulb eez feext. Doctor King can go jump in a lake. Next.

NAIRA: Next slide?

[Rainbirds.]

EDGAR: Here we have a lamprey eel. It should not be in the presentation because it’s a freshwater animal, and it isn’t a real eel. The lamprey is a freshwater or anadromous, parasitic, fishlike vertebrate most abundant in the Great Lakes. It attaches itself to the skin of other fishes, boring holes with an infundibular (i.e. funnel-shaped), jawless mouth that is surrounded by rasping teeth.

NAIRA: It might make the presentation more interesting.

NAIRA: It’s dark outside. It must be getting late.

[Blind.]

NAIRA: Did you see that?

EDGAR: What was it?

NAIRA: A yellow stallion and a blue mare.

EDGAR: What were they doing?

NAIRA: They were heaving against each other. Their breasts and necks.

EDGAR: I saw a unicorn.

NAIRA: A unicorn out there?

EDGAR: Mais oui. The unicorn is a fabulous and legendary animal regarded as having the body of a horse with a single horn projecting from its forehead. But in actual fact, the unicorn has a body resembling a horse, the head of a deer, the feet of an elephant and the tail of a lion with a single black horn growing from the middle of the forehead. The horn is said to possess medicinal or magical healing properties, especially as an antidote or a preventive of poison.

NAIRA: I don’t believe in fairy tales.

EDGAR: Neither do I, Naira. I’m a Marine Biologist.8) The narwhal was sometimes referred to as the sea-unicorn or unicorn-fish. It attained a length of eleven to sixteen feet without the tusk. It was an arctic cetacean valued for its oil and ivory. Only the male had a long, spiral tusk extending from the upper jaw.

NAIRA: You must show me this tusk. How long did it grow — do you remember?

[A flute is heard.]

EDGAR: Somewhere someone is playing a flute.9)

CURTAIN

1) DR. KING: “Would it not be ‘glorious’ ... to establish, in America, the sole unquestionable aristocracy — that of intellect — ... to lead + to control it?” (E. A. Poe — letter to Sarah Whitman)

Ostrom, John Ward The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, I. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University press, 1948, pp. 409-10.

2) DR. KING: “The character of Poe’s mind was of such an order, as not to be very widely in demand. The class of educated mind which he could readily and profitably address, was small — the channels through which he could do so at all, were few.” (George R. Graham — former employer)

Quinn, Arthur Hobson Edgar Allan Poe. New York: D. Appleton Century Company Inc., 1941, p. 664.

3) DR. KING: “... the writer of fiction, who looks most sagaciously to his own interest, will combine all votes by inter-mingling with his loftier efforts such amount of less ethereal matter as will give general currency to his composition.” (E. A. Poe — on Charles Dickens)

Stedman, E.C. and Woodberry, G.E. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, VII. London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1895 (printed Cambridge, Massachusetts: University Press), p. 67.

4) DR. KING: “... Poe the critic would, I think, take many of his own biography oriented critics to task, for it was Poe who argued, in a manner which uncannily foreshadows the theories of New Criticism, that the work of art is an integral and self-contained fact, embodying ‘everything necessary for its understanding’.” (David Galloway)

Galloway, David Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Great Britain: Hazell Watson + Viney Ltd., 1967 (ed. 1978), “Introduction”, p. 41.

5) DR. KING: “You take delight in exposing me before those whom you think likely to advance my interest in this world — You suffer me to be subjected to the whims & caprice not only of your own white family, but the complete authority of the blacks —” (E. A. Poe — letter to John Allan)

Galloway, David Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Great Britain: Hazell Watson + Viney Ltd., 1967 (ed. 1978), “Introduction”, p. 28.

6) DR. KING: “... we can scarcely imagine a time when there did not exist a necessity, or at least a desire, of transmitting information from one individual to another in such a manner as to elude comprehension ...” (E. A. Poe — on writing in cipher)

Poe, E.A. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. England: Penguin Books, 1975 (ed. 1982), “Introduction by Harold Beaver”, p. 26.

7) DR. KING: “... the ... energetic, busy spirit of the age [tends] wholly ... to the curt, the terse, the well-timed, and the readily diffused, in preference to the old forms of the verbose and the ponderous + the inaccessible.” (E. A. Poe — on magazine literature)

Ostrom, John Ward The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, I. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1948, p. 268.

8) DR. KING: “The long list of subjects in which Poe was, or pretended to be, an expert includes modern foreign languages, Oriental linguistics, classical culture, Egyptology, physics, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, logic, phrenology, seamanship, landscaping, music, painting, cryptography and duelling.” (William Charvat)

Charvat, William The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1968, from “Poe: Journalism and the theory of Poetry”, p. 98.

9) DR. KING: “In speaking of song-writing, I mean ... the composition of brief poems ...” (E. A. Poe — ‘Song-Writing’, one of the ‘Marginalia’. ‘Song-Writing’ appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1849.)

Galloway, David Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Great Britain: Hazell Watson + Viney Ltd., 1967 (ed. 1978), p. 493.