Time's Arrow

Series
Online
Original Broadcast Date
October 10, 2004
Cast
Larry Block, Joe Frank
Format
Serious Monologue, Telephone, 59 minutes
Preceded by:	Endings
Followed by:	Duplicity
Not available

"Recently I was in an experimental project in which all the other actors were in their early thirties, and I found it - really awful."

Time's Arrow is a program Joe Frank produced as part of the series Online. It was originally broadcast on October 10, 2004.

Synopsis

Larry tells of an acting job in which others patronized him because he's old.

1:10: Joe tells of a young Arab Palestinian recruited by Hamas because of his resentment of his father's loss of his legs in the '67 war. With a bomb attached, he approaches an Israeli settlement. An Israeli soldier challenges him, tells him he will shoot unless he stops. Then the soldier wakes up, realizes he was dreaming it. He sees a young man advancing on the settlement, challenges him, thinks of the brilliant deaf Hasid young man who it could be instead, doesn't shoot.

6:40: A Christian American pastor with his family from Mississippi approaches the same checkpoint. He sees a young man blow himself up, lifting their car off the ground. Then he wakes up. He and his family are about to fly to Israel. He thinks about his family and hometown.

13:40: Larry tells Joe he's wasted his life. They discuss wanting to die, knowing how near it is.

16:20: Joe talks about his 93-year-old mother and the other old people in the home where she lives, how their bodies and minds are failing.

18:30: Joe talks about different ways to measure time, both astronomically long and personally short.

20:50: Larry talks about Doris Day, how he was hot for her when he was a boy. Now she's 'beat up and bloated' and a wealthy old guy is squiring her around. He talks about accepting the 'eternity of death'.

25:00: Joe talks about his growing old and the inevitability of time.

27:00: Larry tells Joe about taking his dog for a walk on a beautiful day, starts off optimistic, turns pessimistic, plans to get drunk at home.

30:10: Joe and Larry talk about suicide hotlines, that the people who man them are failed suicides. Larry suggests the callers-in are their suicide hotline. Joe tells Larry some try to get callers-in to commit suicide, that they're infiltrators from the Hemlock Society.

37:30: Joe feels ill. The next day his physician finds nodules on his spine with an MRI. He's terrified and feels removed at the same time.

39:10: Joe and his girlfriend go to a party. He can't get into the spirit of the party. After they come home his girlfriend wants to make love, Joe doesn't. She leaves. Joe wets his bed.

43:00: He returns to his physician's office a week later for the results of his tests.

44:30: Larry visits his father's grave in an out-of-the-way section of Queens that takes a long bus trip. On the way back, he's about to sit on a freshly-painted bench when the painters, happening by, warn him.

47:20: Joe tries to keep busy: 'concerts and art openings... flash mobs from online chat rooms... a singles dinner for professionals over 40 given at a trendy restaurant in Brentwood... male-bonding.' but can barely get up the energy to go to work. He thinks about killing himself. He wonders why we suffer. He thinks there must be a reason for life, but can't imagine it. He finds scripture unsatisfying.

51:00: Larry describes jobs he thinks he'd like: repairing parking meters, delivering fresh-baked bread.

52:40: Joe comments on a ferry boat disaster

53:00: Joe comments on religionists fighting each other on the news.

53:30: Joe:

'Oh, and every time I see you, I can feel the hair on the back of my arms, rise up like a great forest of black rubber penises. Yes, eyes swollen shut by insect bites, let us walk hand in hand in the park, where the students sit at the University of Outhouse.

'Do you realize that somewhere in the world at this very moment, an old man carrying a briefcase, is walking up a cobblestone street in the late evening,? that an overweight child on a bicycle is struggling up a steep driveway? that a three-legged dog is lying at the feet of an Indian peasant, who is roasting a small duck over a flaming automobile tire? and that an old woman wearing on her head a tiara, made of tin foil, is skipping across a field and with a toy wand, blessing farm animals?

'The women come and go speaking of the Regis Philbin show.

'A pig's foot and an ancient table top is all we need before sunrise.

'He claimed it was a joyless union.

'This is the last time I'll ever replace a rotting Halloween pumpkin, with a water balloon made from a latex glove.

'The seasons will go round. The Northern lights will shine. There will be trips to the country, dinners and restaurants with one's friends, hours spent reading books and talking on the telephone. There will be dental appointments, times when you'll forget to take your medication, when you'll lock your keys in the car, lose your sunglasses, and when you'll slap your forehead and say, "What an idiot! How could I have said that?", times when you'll be awakened early in the morning by the garbage truck, when you'll cut yourself shaving, when you'll be interrupted by a phone call from a telemarketer, when you'll vote for the lesser of two evils.

'So let's drink to light bulbs crushed, and those illuminated, to candles burnt at both ends. Let's lift our glasses to the woman I saw yesterday in the supermarket, whose deliberate and delicate choice of meat may be think of going home and constructing out of old bones, sinew and collected fat, a sculpture of myself, gazing toward the horizon. So, thank you for overstaying my welcome, and I hope you enjoy myself.'

57:00: Larry reminds Joe of the days when he was a camper, wanted to be tapped into its 'Sanhedrin' He kept hoping others: the world, the theatre, would appreciate him, has his whole life, but they haven't.

Legacy Synopsis

• Larry talks about being in a production with young actors. Joe: old people have nothing to teach us.
• Joe - The story of a man in a poor village recruited by Hamas to attack the guard post at an Israeli settlement. The man awakes to realize he is actually an Israeli soldier guarding the settlement, a secular Jew new to Israel who hates god for torturing humanity. A man approaches the gate, who may be a spiritually gifted deaf hassid from the neighboring village or a bomber in disguise. A Christian pastor drives past and is caught in an explosion, only to wake up and realize it is a dream. The world seen from an ever-retreating vantage point.
• Larry - Waiting for a life changing epiphany. Beckett's, "You think you're simply resting. . ." Wanting to die and eat and drink. The time before we die.
• Joe - His mother lives in a nursing home near a schoolyard. Old people were once young. Mechanisms for trying to stop time. Measuring time in various events - mountain building, a root canal, traffic. Your life set against billions of years.
• Larry - Doris Day as an old woman, accompanied by an ugly old man; waiting for Doris. Our time alive, compared to time without us. Knowing you'll never live to see a construction project finished.
• Joe - growing old; the hour glass of life. Time as a river, a wall, a burning plane. A world without time.
• Larry - a brief flash of optimism dissolves into wanting, the need for a sandwich and scotch.
• Joe and Larry - jumping while talking on a cell phone with the suicide hotline. An impressionable person on a hotline gets talked into suicide. Suicide hotline operators on the verge of suicide. Hemlock Society infiltrators sabotaging suicide hotlines.
• Joe - He's overcome with lethargy at a diner. A doctor orders brain cancer screening. Becoming distracted at a dinner party. Wetting the bed.
• Larry - visiting a graveyard and encountering wet paint.
• Joe - wanting to go back to bed. Methods of suicide. Age and wisdom. Relating to the scripture of the ancients. The childish stories of scripture.
• Larry - he wants to be a parking meter repairman.
• Joe - a sailboat disaster. TV news, religion pitted against religion. Nonsense verse: A poem. Things happening at this moment. A pig's foot and an ancient table top.
• Larry - unjustified optimism.

Music

• "Alone in Kyoto" - Air (from Talkie Walkie, 2003) | YouTube [0:59]
• "Midnight Sun" - David Sylvian (from Dead Bees On A Cake, 1999) | YouTube [22:28]