The drama of recognition is a story without names. The double, the ambivalent, the uncertain, these are the categories we must accept. Only something like a mineral garden is left.

Laura is an incomplete person. She is attached to the mineral world like a science fiction. The mechanism always conceals.

When did you first realize you were named for a movie?

The real is a romantic notion. Like a mental illness in which particles are magnetized and drawn into patterns. The world causes it.

Actors will do anything. Natural elements are convincing. I see I am where I began. A song played in a minor key. You can feel the hands on the strings.

Little girls play by the fragile mother of one of them. I have never seen a fragile woman before. She seems pale. We play quietly. Later we are lost. A witch comes out of a door like birds.

A grown woman is under the lights. They are a negative pleasure. He is the cause. He needs official surroundings. Carries a puzzle box. The box is a game. A stage.

This is the place. His is the classic line. He is a natural hero. He needs the world. It is a conflict between an accurate reading and what he wants to call human nature. The history of order. The two volcanoes represent the combination of stories. We are the world.

Genres, on the other hand, persist through time.

Laura doesn't narrate her own story. There is a woman. It is not a painting but a painted photograph. The painting is the real character. The man and the painting. She sleeps with the artist. But it's only sleep. He reads everything she has written. He says "you are supposed to be dead." She says "How does it feel?"

But it is only a symbolic search.

An underlit scene. She is the compositional focus. The plumes of snow are preserved in the stone. They are a reminder like guilt. The attempt to abandon the mineral world is imagined by the writer in the voice of a man. His name is Laura. The other woman has a man's names. We have to use it.

He has your name. There is a feminine quality to it though it means man. The polar Laura he pictures at the beginning has nothing to do with the animate creature she wants to have been. By the end she is simply glad to be alive. He doesn't have to like it. He can do anything he wants. There is nothing to prove.

Turning from one book to the other. My sorrow is invisible. She reads all day. All night she sleeps dreaming of reading. "I cast the shadow in front of me, walking."

The writer is gone. She wrote books about women. A woman rustles in satin. She smells good. A child's memory of his mother, also gone. Laura is one of them. She picks black-eyed Susans with her father. Things happen.

Except for the hopelessness you feel, realism had nothing to do with it.

She holds a book in her hands and wonders if the person ever existed. Or the situation holds her and she blames the book. Volcanic glass notwithstanding. It was an adventure of definitions. Even the possibility of names was a defeat. Going through. You will not see me. Going through again. In this world.

She almost didn't take the part. Musicians occasionally have recourse to the song. It was the flat truth. The two dream choices. Chosen over and over. The anonymous explosion of death.

Turning back at noon. I know you. The melody goes back on itself.

The script is transparent with use. We throw it away with a certain sadness, retaining the speech of one, the cries of another. The vulnerability of the actor remains, his desperate, molested beauty.

Both names are used in referring to the character. She takes over the narration by force of will. She doesn't speak but it is known what she would say. We speak for her.

They meet under the image of a life pictured by someone else. She has devised it . A change takes place.

A crime called the Siege of Babylon. He was a veteran of that. He was partly made of metal. Silver metal like the sun. I saw him without it once. Look at her.

Nostalgia for oneself. I walked a long time. There was a moment of another world. I am not her. She thinks. The fact of not being there affects the one who is not there as much as the others. This is not their story. This is not my story but a story of recognition.

Thoughtful music as he reads her diary. Something like time goes by. The letters in their dead packets. Something like a song isn't alive so it can't die.

He smiles at the idea of her portrait. He falls asleep with the music. A door opens and closes. She is alive.

It was a summer of storms. Storms as they happen here. Wind and whiteness pour over the hills. Silence surrounds the buildings. Incapable of doing anything.

Does our ability to stop the action have anything to do with time? Holed up with supplies to last forever. He put his foot through the clock. I was actually afraid.

But volcanoes are not the only anachronisms here.

Of course we pretend we are in another time. Or place. Though not consciously. Ignoring the sun. Laura appears. There is no path through the clear rocks. Like in the poem. It is an empty form. Inevitable. It has happened before. There is no end to its closure.

After the day of forgetting is Independence Day. The body in movement aware of possibility. Facing away. Toward the sea. The exquisite emptiness of the city.

The actors go through again. Until it means nothing to them. To us.