Written by Harry Clark
3M, 4W, Single Set
Sudden Light
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
You have been mine before,
How long I may not know:
But just when at that swallow’s soar
Your neck turned so,
Some veil did fall, —- I knew it all of yore.
Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time’s eddying flight
Still with our lives our loves restore
In depth’s despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Since returning to Tucson, my hometown, I’ve committed to a book club one Sunday a month. The rules of the club are but one: fiction only, please. How we determine what we read, what food or drink to bring, or whose house we are to meet at next is done by osmosis. It’s enriched my life greatly reading authors I might not have gotten to—Murakami, Coetzee, Marai, Petterson—and I’ve suggested a few writers that I think were generally given good grades—Alice Munro receiving A’s from everyone. The other enrichment is of course the thoughtful, fun and colorful cast of characters gathered one Sunday per month.
Couple the book club setting with several fascinating articles I read about Déjà vu Syndrome and I had a play in the ready. Déjà vu Syndrome, a rare but debilitating disease, is a mirror image of Alzheimer’s—being too much in mind as opposed to too much out of mind. Everything is a repeat memory as contrasted to lost memory, and of course isn’t much theater about remembrance—too much, too little, colored or changed by time.
Pluto Déjà Vu is set in Tucson, and speaks to things seven disparate characters with their love of literature discover about one another. The work is a collage, a remembrance of things that matter to me: literature, memory, hometown, and Pluto.