Rivendell
from The Booth
Holly Harden & Leo HwangLeo
There is tension in the booth as I lower the house lights of the Little Theater. The crowds of writers and agents and publishers fade into anonymous shapes and shadows. It is August hot, but we've cut the power to the fans in order to remove any oscillating intrusion. Already I can see the flutter of shadow hands and shadow papers fanning away like moth wings. As I pull the spotlight up I glance over at your folded shape, curling as if you could slip your entire body into the eyepiece of the video camera. The spotlight on the podium is a cue; it is what dampens the communication of ideas and inspiration between participants, and refocuses them on the vessel arriving squint-eyed at the podium carrying pages and books. My fingertips dance over the buttons of the tape recorder, telling me in the dim light that recording has started. If I let them rest a moment I can feel the whirring of the tape mechanism, the flitting slip of the tape counter ticking off numbers like an odometer reading on a trip to an unknown destination.
The poet steps up to the pair of Shure SM 57s fixed to the gooseneck with black gaffer's tape and draws from the glass of ice water you left for him on the shelf under the podium desk. We can all hear the water pulse down his throat, the ice hitting his teeth and the edge of glass. I place my hands on the sliders that control the house volume running from the huge Peavey power amp out to the speakers fixed in the rafters. He asks: "Can everybody hear me?"
Holly
Things work this way: you the ears, me the eyes behind a window dividing us from those gathered below. We were told to synchronize things and we have: the moment you activate the audio, I focus and press "record." There is tension here. Will the lights dim properly? Will cues be taken? Will the poet's words be inaudible or lost? In the glare of the lights, she shadows her face with her hand and peers upward. Now? May I begin? she asks with her eyes, her eyebrows raised, her countenance eager, suspended in the pause we all share. As the words begin, I am transfixed. Through this window, this lens, I see what your tapes can't capture-the curtain rippling in the sudden night breeze, the audience rapt, the dark lines of the rafters and the light of the spaces they hold. I see the poet herself, the curve of her neck, how she leans into her words as if for a drink of milk or a kiss, how "undulate" might be a word for what her lines do as she reads, but not quite; she doesn't ripple as much as she softens and fades forward into the light from above, from where we are as we work. Only when our elbows touch, or when the other speaks in whispers or a language of signs do we remember we are two people together behind a window on the world. We are more than ears or eyes; we are all senses aloft. We are curators of the museum of once-spoken words, and we keep them as we keep them.
Leo
Every once in a while I do not trust my ears, and travel down the dark stairs, through the heavy curtains, and stand in the back of the theater below the bleachers. I listen to how the waves of his words reflect off of hard surfaces, but are absorbed by the bodies filling the rows of seats. I listen for the cancellation of sounds that can happen if volume and reflection and inflection intersect incongruously, and through the curtains behind me, filtering down from where you sit comparing eye to lens, I hear the latency of sound traversing wire and circuitry where time becomes slowed and the booth becomes reflective. The voice from here, is like an echo, but in the booth, it is the moment that makes all the difference, that allows us an extra intake of breath, and even amidst all the flash of led lights and hum of electrical current, we see the poet and man, the words that he lets leave his mouth, in a different light than any of the other hundreds of people sitting and listening with eyes open and eyes shut.
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