Lovers Fragments
By Justin Hayford
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Exile and eroticism go together like New Year’s and hangovers. Away from numbing familiarities the senses reawaken, discovering sublimity in circumstances most people wouldn’t tolerate for five minutes back home. The mold-infested $11-a-night pension with tissue-thin walls and a bed that lists hard to port has an unmistakable Old World charm. The tasteless sponge that passes for bread in every Parisian sidewalk cafe becomes a gustatory sacrament. The greasy-haired waiter in the poorly tailored waistcoat is the man of your dreams.
The piece opens with a particularly arresting image: four people kneeling before a huge pile of white rice begin to sort through it meticulously, seemingly one grain at a time, as though searching for something. The earnestness of their search makes its futility all the more poignant. But the image falls apart when a man gathers up a handful of rice and passes it with an inexplicably reverent air to the woman next to him, giving her a long, meaningful look. What had been startlingly real–sifting through rice grain by grain–becomes a hollow show of forced artfulness. He offers her not a handful of rice but a handful of significance, yet nothing in the opening image suggests why plain white rice–which we’ve seen a stagehand dump onstage from an enormous Riceland bag before the show begins–should suddenly mean something to her. Or to him, for that matter.
