Nature and Boxes: Narration

[ Nude cast moves together in a "nature body" ]

Nature is rich and complex, beautiful and hideous beyond understanding

blossoming around red with everyone and everything
limbs growing the deaths the slavery
licking sky
turning into calling you
letting down veil your boxes
in one coiling, snailing sun
and another human of crashing waves
that lives and that whispers
we usher fertile, tiny openings

[ Nude players have their limbs boxed ]

We try sometimes to make some sense of Nature,
picking out a part here and there, marking, naming

Nature member the guiding warmth, letting down veil after veil to unbeat
fall together into a field of passionate, boiling sun
merging in motion with all the wind that whispers,
that lives and breathes around through all the tiny openings
our naked bodies drink the riches, your mind up into the heavens
the delicate breezes and great invade your seclusion
we are water flowing and fire dance illusions, the deaths, the slavery
limbs growing and nature resounding you remember me

As we work on making sense,
it seems we're starting to get some control

the BOX is the fundamental rationalist gesture
creating rough limits in each of the invented independent dimensions
Descartes being God gives us the orthogonal coordinate system
the three-D plus time of Newtonian mechanics
from the Greeks, hail Euclid, right angles
the physical box
the philosophical box, the epistemological box:
get a minimized set of principles
that's elegance, says Occam
that's Understanding

[ Nature body is dispersed; all bodies are separately boxed now ]

We run into problems, forgetting these boxes are approximations
we turn them into ideals
We go overboard, develop an addiction to understanding
Hunger for control becomes a fever
Nature loses its character
We lose our character

[ Cast flails about trying to touch, hold hands ]

Eventually we start to see the error of our ways
We begin to try to recover our lost grace
some of this release we reach each "on our own"
some we reach in pairs
and some only happens in groups

Nature draws us out with an ocean of thundering heartbeats
We aspire to the grace of flesh and water
Taste me with your salty hunger, find me in your memory

We throw ourselves at each other, again and again,
in glorious, divinely-ordered battle
destroying patches and layers of each other's shells
revealing inner detail - finer, more specific, realer
battling to reveal each other's inner nature
cracking each other's prisons

Taste me with your patches and layers - find me in your me's
Nature draws out your memory
We aspire to what you have known for aeons
Give birth to Us
Erupt suddenly into the body
you have always others' inner nature
Out. Out. Out. Now. prisons break out.
Become the nature.

[ Cast smashes together rhythmically and throws off boxes
  Players become the writhing nude "nature body" again ]