Three Mazes (for Caryl Churchill) [2012]

1.  Many years ago, when you were a child.  Indoors, by candlelight.

My mazes are friends and riddles, and walking within them is a trial of their friendship riddled surfaces.  Surfaces are not curious flesh pressed against glass or damp streets.  With pressing conviction, I am pacing as they confess surface truths, and I am standing as they stand my lying.  Their lying is a labyrinthine process of elimination, and familial, and they cannot wind through it simply.  The simple process becomes procession, and lying hats are to be worn, as conviction becomes true friendship moving forward.  This is how lost in them is a moving experience, is a process, is a question, is from a truly distant perspective.   

2.  Today, as you read this.  Indoors, by lamplight.

They are to be tapped, and they are enormous and unavoidable.  They are their own ragged distances confirmed, by pathetic attempts to affect them, and by weekly notifications from the managing family.  But they are still, at an arm's length, available to be pored over and adorned.  And they are bewildering as we speak, as we unwrap our packaged questions, as we engage in our coded conversations.  They are tall and preposterous, and they have been made wasted and ornate.  Yet, engaging them as decorations is unadvisable, especially as they might lean to your ear, and as their enigmas might be speech-encoded comforts meant to pad you in your quest for conclusions.  They are speaking as affected ends, perpetually ending. 

3.  In the not-too-distant future.  In a large, fenced-in yard, by floodlight.

Their beaten endings aren't always to be reached, or even to be seen, at a distance, or otherwise.  And it is impossible to be without them, or to rise above them, or to extinguish them like candles.  And the riddles ARE the surfaces, whether befriended, executed, or not.  These lies are ignited, and they are true.  These mazes are they, and they are you.