You are Listening to TAPE 5 - The Pit.
This is Archipelago. No one is an Island. You are Archipelago as we are Archipelago.
Today let’s try something different.
It is October 24th, 1929.
You are on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
You’ve been in it all morning.
Dust clouds of chalk form around the blackboards as pricing shifts.
Clerks darting to the booths to phone in orders.
Something just got up on the board.
Something turning the pit into a frenzy.
In the massive rumble of bids, you’re trying to make your gestures heard.
Turmoil of waving hands and slips of paper.
Nobody hears anything now.
Your finger on your eyebrow – ‘quantity 10’.
Both hands up, palms open – ‘Sell’.
A man across the pit, catches your eye.
His finger on his eyebrow – yes ‘ten’.
His hands rising, palms away from you – ‘buy’.
A clerk scribbles it on a paper slip.
He reaches in above the crowd, almost letting himself fall onto it.
Note waving between his fingertips.
You reach out for the slip. To close the bid.
The hand with the paper slip sails away as the crowd swivels and folds in on itself.
Avalanching.
The surge leads you with it in and you drop a step.
Two more steps and you’ll be down in the centre of the octagon depression.
Someone grips your collar, there is a tearing sound and your heels click on the steps behind you.
A guy scratches your cheek, as he falls into the claws and bites of the pit.
Someone just punched a floor broker in the face.
A torn flap pocket, a ripped sleeve.
A fountain pen spilling, smears exchanged.
Who dropped their waistcoat in the middle of this?
You’re panting – like the rest of them; wolfs, bulls, killer apes, lions.
Red ink now, instead of blue. Far too much of it, to be coming from a fountain pen.
The clerk sinks into the crowd.
You see the piece of paper, as he loosens his grip.
You jump at it.
And you as well, are instantly pulled down.
All the way down.
Your face flat to the slippery scarlet floor.
All the two-tone wingtip perforated lace up dress shoes coming down on you, from above.
Out of the thicket of splotched suit pants, a dark arm reaches out for you.
A shadowy face.
A mouth.
It tells you something, as a hand at the end of that dark arm, pulls you further down.
It is immanent.
And when you’re ready.
Come out.
Burst In
The actor bursts into the scene. The abrupt violence of the door swung open to be slammed back shut, the full weight of the body making sure it stays shut. This frantic moment is soon replaced by a return to the previous tedious murmur of inactivity and killing of time. The composed atmosphere creates a surreal contrast to the proposed panic that led up to this bursting in. The violent entrance came as no surprise. It is almost as if these doors burst open all the time - again and again. And always the immanent threat from outside, is instantaneously deemed unremarkable and not worth the attention. The return to a state of normalcy, of perpetuation; always leading up to new indications of an immanent/imminent threat. The temporality of the burst in action promises the occurring of something evental, but the quality of immediacy is immediately and effortlessly drowned in the dense ocean of the ongoing. The violence of this abrupt entrance was imagined as a form of unplanned violence to the atmosphere of the board room setting. An unrehearsed break with the constructed reality of the board room, hinting at some other violence unfolding outside the frame that contrasts the ritualistically ordered violence, the anticipation of which, holds the board room atmosphere together.
