A Reproduction (all the ghosts were children) : Imagined Theatres

Form	Themes	Histories	Politics	Philosophies	Experiments
repetition humor reference television tragicomedy list analysis	representation animal absence loss repetition forgetting memory cartoons supernatural reproduction ghosts eternity tv television Hanna-Barbera dramatis personae	popular		performance studies

within a barrel

[picture of thin white man, green shirt, brown pants, light blonde chin hair]: like how do like I become more my like mother?

[picture of athletic-build great dane, dark brown, black spots, blue collar with golden tags]: I rever knew her.

[picture of thin white man, green shirt, brown pants, light blonde chin hair]: like when she like died, a flower grew in like my stomach. even the like acid has water.

[picture of athletic-build great dane, dark brown, black spots, blue collar with golden tags]: raggy, I ralways knew you to have a terrarium rinside you rall ralong.

[picture of thin white man, green shirt, brown pants, light blonde chin hair]: like are we seeing like things? scoob? scoob? scoob? ya there, scoob?

[picture of athletic-build great dane, dark brown, black spots, blue collar with golden tags]: re have to berieve what re saw; how can my reyes deceive me?

[picture of picture of athletic-build great dane, dark brown, black spots, blue collar with golden tags rubbing eyes in disbelief, the glitter of life falling down, the ghosts having echoed as false illusions having been trapped behind eyes and under eardrums to the very goosepimples rising now, there being no way out, there being no way to avoid]: ris sucks.

[picture of thin white man, green shirt, brown pants, light blonde chin hair]: like where did every like body go?

[picture of athletic-build great dane, dark brown, black spots, blue collar with golden tags]: know-redge gives me no rerief; ri run through reveryday rin panic.

[picture of thin white man, green shirt, brown pants, light blonde chin hair]: like scoob, my stomach like.

[picture of picture of athletic-build great dane, dark brown, black spots, blue collar with golden tags serving as priestess/midwife. picture of thin white man, green shirt, brown pants, light blonde chin hair from out the stomach, young boy jenkins arriving and having placed over body and face the jeepers creepers mask which accompanies the child into old age and death. later the meddling kids then bring the end with the revelation of plot and resetting of narrative and blame.]: sigh, rerief.

[picture of thin white man, green shirt, brown pants, light blonde chin hair]: like how do I know like my mother? scoob, it’s like just this.

[picture of athletic-build great Dane, dark brown, black spots, blue collar with golden tags]: come on, raggy. you rook rungry.

[picture of thin white man, green shirt, brown pants, light blonde chin hair]: like is the like coast clear?

[picture of athletic-build great Dane, dark brown, black spots, blue collar with golden tags]: not yet, but re must renture ron.

[picture of thin white man, green shirt, brown pants, light blonde chin hair]: like a sandwich would be like nice.

out of the barrel

Over the course of A Reproduction something feels familiar yet strange—increasingly both—until it slides into the category of our brain built by Saturday morning cartoons. The language is halting for both the thin white man and the athletic-build great Dane, this week’s mystery having plunged us into the depths of existential ennui characters must feel as they live every day, as pictures of themselves, inside a box of repetition.

How does a person know oneself, when faced with a reproduction or a re-presentation of the self? How can one track one’s own origin, when the current experience is so immediate and present? I know at one point in my life I was shorter than I am now, but I can only ever see a re-presentation of myself reflected back. My actual self feels no taller or shorter than it did when I was twelve. My body may have aged years and years, but my sense of my location in myself is as constant as when I was sixteen.

The thin man and the great Dane spend their lives (can they be called lives if they have no relation to time?) journeying narrative mysteries and then re-journeying those same mysteries with every re-run of each episode. With each retreading of each story, do they form a groove in the narrative fabric of the universe? What’s gained in cycling and re-cycling the bottom of this barrel?

It used to be that when you played a cassette tape or a VHS, each trip the tape took through the machine wore down the invisible grooves of data, so that every visit to that story became less and less clear. They say that the more you remember memories, the less accurate they become. In the “real”, world, this world of plastic and terabytes, nothing really dies or decays anymore. With each journey for the thin man and the great Dane, the journey has no impact on the data itself. Nothing changes.

The more I travel this story with them, the more and more familiar it becomes; more and more a part of my imagination, and less and less what it was when I encountered it.

A Reproduction (all the ghosts were children)

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A Reproduction (all the ghosts were children)

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