Translating Innocence

Saw this piece Saturday night (click "bildgalerie anzeigen" for pictures). I was blown away by the set - 3 walls of clothes, a floor of water - the costumes, the performers, and the text itself. Unschuld, it's called in German.

Innocence.

Five different stories of people living on the fringes of society eventually intersect by the end of the piece. There are the illegal immigrants who witness a women drowning, there is a blind stripper and a guilt-ridden mother whose son opened fire on innocent bystanders. There's the diabetic amputee mother-in-law of a man who cleans dead bodies for a living but who won't touch his own wife. Their stories are told in language that is once concrete and metaphysical, like the mundane bus-stop conversation that starts on the topic of a lost umbrella and becomes one about the existence of God.

One of the characters is a political writer married to a goldsmith, a cruel intellectual who admits to having burned all of her books except for one. Her monologues were some of the most inspiring texts in the play to me. Here's a small portion of one.

Ich will keine Draufsicht

Ich will keine Überblickphilosophie

Ich will keine lückenlose Zusammenhangserklärung

Ich hasse Systeme

Ich werde mich ganz dem Fragment, dem Lückenhaften, dem Unvollkommenen, dem Bruch, dem Bodensatz, dem Unverstandenen, dem einzelnen kleinsten Fastnichts widmen.

Das ist die Herausforderung.

Das ist das Leben.

Das ist das Herausforderung des Lebens.

Die Unzuverlässigkeit der Welt.

I don't want any oversight

I don't want a comprehensive philosophy

I don’t want an explanation of seamless interconnectedness

I hate systems

I will dedicate myself completely to the fragment, the incomplete, the imperfect, the fracture, the sediment, the incomprehensible, the single smallest increment.

That is the challenge.

That is life.

That is the challenge of life.

The unreliability of the world.