Never Dead Poets

Looking for the Face I had before the world was made
by Terry Talty
January 29, 2010

DENVER, COLORADO - Disembodied lips enunciated clearly the plight of the speaker feeling disconnected from the world and her physical body. The brain ... and the brain ... the lips say, and emphasize with the few poignant pauses. This 14-minutes monologue is so fast you originally believe it's in a foreign language.

The language is that of Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright who gave us Waiting for Godot and many other surrealistic plays and stories. The lips are a 2 foot by 1 foot video projection made before the playwright died in 1989, and it is installed in a completely black room at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. The background of the face or anything else that would be on the screen is black. The projected lips are a deep value of black, the mouth less deep and the teeth white, and moving as fast as the lips.

Of course this image is intriguing. Is it the face I had before the world was made? as the title of this six-part exhibition at the MCA is called? 

Before The World Was Made

If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.

What if I look upon a man
As though on my beloved,
And my blood be cold the while
And my heart unmoved?
Why should he think me cruel
Or that he is betrayed?
I'd have him love the thing that was
Before the world was made.

Beckett's film piece is called Not I. The speaker continually talks about the the person who is physically moving about: looking at something in a museum, grocery shopping, typing as the Not I, not the person that the speaker feels she is. She doesn't recognize her physical self. She sighs, she screams a little, she emotes and is rational. This may sound like too much to take for 14 minutes, but the speech is as open as an astrology column. The lips for words, words make thoughts, spoken thoughts lead to created thoughts, thoughts trigger emotions, emotions fire sensations, create more thoughts and on and on.

Out of the blue, a friend of mine said to me a while ago, "I don't want to die. I really like thinking."

Is this experience in a dark room with disembodied lips what I was before the world was made? And is that different from the one that will be mine after my world is gone?