CIVIL warS: Laurie Anderson's Soliloquy as Mary Todd Lincoln

I was trying to find that awesome spoken (not sung) soliloquy from Scene C of the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson collab on YouTube.

I was hoping that it had been filmed at one time and somebody had it up.

But maybe it was never filmed. Or maybe nobody added it.

I had been listening to that again the other day, and she is just perfect in her delivery of that soliloquy.

She heeds Glass's music perfectly (big surprise) and the strange mutations of martial music he's throwing down in that section, and you really feel America just coming apart the way Mary Todd Lincoln's mind is coming apart (the scattered collaged bits of her correspondence with clear anachronisms strewn throughout). But then there's this driving force towards sanity, cohesion, union!

It's a splendid piece.

It's a splendid American piece.

The music respects the dignity of that moment in history; it understands how much was pivoting on that one man.

And yet it takes the view from a troubled parallax: Mary Todd Lincoln.

Her correspondence (from which the soliloquy is surely partly drawn) affiliates her not with those who work the machinations of history, but those who are manipulated by it. She is repeating the niceties and pieties by which civilization stands, but she can't really feel them as truth.

"It must have been a terrible war."

Lines so dark, and so funny, but you don't even smile let alone laugh, because the horror is through and through the words.

She's rationalizing loss over and over as the music keeps distorting the martial yet somehow discovers the real dignity of sacrifice (as surely as Saint-Saens' tribute to his fallen friend, the Marche Heroique) in some insanely convincing way. While she is lost again and again in her own words, a maelstrom, a strange cubist portrait in words. Slivers of different angles, different temporalities, the voices of the ones manipulated behind this tragic necessity which the music is glorifying. The inexplicable dignity of the inexorable.

At one point she barks. At one point she growls. "There is. Nothing. The matter. With his. Face."

It truly is a devastating section.

I wanted to see Laurie Anderson perform it as Mary Todd Lincoln.

Maybe that never happened though. Maybe she just laid down the voice and that was it.

"You can't. Stop. Anything."

"Just change the subject."

"Go ahead. Finish the piece."

"Let the murders begin."

"Some suggested pictures dance the night away."

"There's. No one. By my side."

"Who's to say the eyes are honest?"

"I should be dead."

"I'm not nervous. I am just. Scared. To death."

"It must have been a terrible war."

"Don't go away."

"It's over."