The phone rings. Can’t tell you who. I’m sworn. But trust me, Google images knows things.
¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.
¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño;
que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños, sueños son.What is life? A madness.
What is life? An illusion,
a shadow, a story.
And the greatest good is little enough:
for all life is a dream,
and dreams themselves are only dreams.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Life is a Dream, Act II, l. 1195.
This is theater department politics. Knife-fight in a phone booth, but with plastic spoons and a lot of crying.
They’ve already got their shooter, some three-hundred-dollar wedding hack who specializes in groomsmen doing synchronized jumping photos. The Olive Garden of photography.
But someone inside wants better. So I smuggled cameras in as if they’re a flask at high-school prom.
The irony kills me. This exact department. Same building. Twenty years ago, I’m in grad school here playing the goddamn king in Michael’s production. Four pages of Calderón memorized. Four. Pages. Baroque Spanish philosophy turned into blank verse that sounds like someone having an existential crisis in iambic pentameter.
Back then, this department made theater. Did the work themselves. Now? They hire it out. Except their hired gun photographer shoots like he’s covering a bat mitzvah.
I’m a ghost photographing ghosts. Segismundo trapped in his tower, questioning reality. Me, trapped in institutional pettiness, documenting shadows.
¿Qué es la vida?
What is life?
A covert op. A memory. A dream of theater past.